Perspectivism

Light, color, texture, and depth in time and space (Claude Lorrain)

This article explores a process-relational understanding of the observer-observed dynamic, which can be seen as a dialogue within and between three dichotomies that often reappear in the course of its application:

• One-Many (composed of fractal parts, infinite continua, internally differentiating aspects): Every description of the world is from inside, they are all in the first person. The world consists of this reciprocal reflection of dynamically evolving, partial views of itself. There is no perspective capable of transcending the totality of all that is.
• Independent-Interdependent (contextuality of relations, pathos and ethics, causality, logical connectives, etc.): To say that something is real is to say that it participates in relations with other things. Facts are relative to observers. Each of us has a singularly unique body, with particular affects, dispositions, and capacities. As this body changes, so does our perspective. Likewise, the presuppositions that lie behind another's point of view correspond to the uniqueness of the events, objects or persons that informed their development.
  
• Static-Dynamic (rest-motion, the process and possibility of continuous change, flux, transformation): Not constancy, but coordinated variation. Everything flows. As a global culture, we have yet to join a relational conception of economics with the expanding circle of empathy through means of a transpersonal perspective. But individually, through awareness of perspectival delimitation, and how our bodies, preconceptions, and the affective quality of our experiences are shaped by it, we can shift attention away from the self - that is "me and my problems" - and toward the possibility of greater attunement with each other.
  

If you have not yet, I would encourage you to go and read this review by Anil Ananthaswamy: “In “Helgoland” Rovelli explains his “relational” interpretation, in which an electron, say, has properties only when it interacts with something else. When it’s not interacting, the electron is devoid of physical properties: no position, no velocity, no trajectory. Even more radical is Rovelli’s claim that the electron’s properties are real only for the object it’s interacting with and not for other objects. “The world fractures into a play of points of view that do not admit of a univocal, global vision,” Rovelli writes. Or, as he puts it, “Facts are relative.” It’s a dramatic denunciation of physics as a discipline that provides an objective, third-person description of reality. Rovelli invokes Nagarjuna, a second-century Buddhist thinker, when saying that “every perspective exists only in interdependence with something else, there is never an ultimate reality.”” 

In one of the final subsections of the book, with the heading "The world seen from within", Rovelli states this perspectivism most clearly: "If the world consists of relations, then every description of the world is from inside it, they are all in the first person. The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal, partial perspectives on the world that reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives." (182) This brings to mind the "ethic of reciprocity" that is a central to moral systems around the world. It should not be difficult to see that before we can love our neighbor, we must be able to reflect upon their perspective. The anonymous text that is usually called the Prayer of St. Francis includes the lines "Seek not so much to be understood as to understand." The emphasis is clearly placed on seeing the world through the perspective of others, whether these are family members (past, present, and future) or more distantly related members of Creation (Francis is known for his love of nature). In prayers, meditation, and writing, understanding and exchanging perspectival positions between ourselves and others is one of the objectives. While Rovelli does not speculate on such cultural implications, many psychologists have. Like all things, empathy has limitations and can lead to problems. Fritz Breithaupt warns of these in The Dark Sides of Empathy, as does Paul Bloom in Against Empathy: “I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts.” As they say, the 'road to hell' is paved with good intentions. 

Perspectivism is the first step, and must lead to action that is the result of critical deliberation, if it is to be effective. Bloom suggests that Buddhist meditation is intended to make you more compassionate by diminishing your empathy, so you can help without feeling suffering. He believes that an "appreciation of contingency, of blind luck, isn’t something you get through empathy but through a broader understanding". The extent to which empathy, understanding, or simply our lived experience and embodiment promotes more ethical conduct by changing our relationship to events, shifting our attention, and modifying our perspective remains an open question, but there is no reason to restrict this process to any one, or combination, of these approaches. Most behavior is habitual, automatic, and largely unconscious. For good reason too, or else we would risk overwhelming our cognitive capacities with the minutiae of mundane actions. Change can occur through affective processes whereby we shift patterns to avoid situations that feel incompatible with self-regulation and inarticulated cultural norms. Behavior change can also happen by elevating murky and mostly unconscious intuitions into the glaring mental spotlight of consciousness, analytically reflecting upon them before intentionally intervening to modify their structure, then once again submerging them into the unconscious patterns of habit, solidifying these new and more adaptive structures until the next time they are surfaced and reviewed again. Rovelli's perspectivism is of both kinds. Once we recognize a miss-take, by any means, corrective adjustments can be made. Though this process may illuminate painful shortcomings and failures, it can also be an opportunity for learning and personal growth.

The way we correlate observations, allocate attention, where we invest effort, how we draw conclusions and determine meaning, there are implications for all these processes. I was struck by an apparent similarity, not just to Nagarjuna (about which Rovelli goes into depth in his book), but also to Wang Yangming (who was not mentioned). One may be tempted, by such profound relationalism, to think this is nothing but the solipsism of an extreme skeptic. That would be a grave misunderstanding; these are not equivalent. Yangming wrote: "Separated from my clear intelligence, there will be no heaven, earth, spiritual beings, or myriad things, and separated from these, there will not be my clear intelligence... Why should it be that if my clear intelligence is gone they will all cease to exist? Consider the dead man. His spirit has drifted away and dispersed. Where are his heaven and earth and myriad things?" Here Yangming shows that relationality is primary and existence (as popularly understood) is secondary. This is echoed in another passage which is more subtle, showing that all knowledge is underwritten by relationships of interacting parts: "People today distinguish between knowledge and action and pursue them separately, believing that one must know before he can act. They will discuss and learn the business of knowledge first, they say, and wait till they truly know before they put their knowledge into practice. Consequently, to the last day of life, they will never act and also will never know. This doctrine of knowledge first and action later is not a minor disease and it did not come about only yesterday. My present advocacy of the unity of knowledge and action is precisely the medicine for that disease." That disease has continued today. The cultural zeitgeist of Western civilization for about the last half millenium has been afflicted by the presumption of an objectively knowable deterministic material fundament, one that must be graspable in principle. And accordingly, such grasping is preferably prerequisite to any decisive action taken. But this fundament does not exist, and the entire conceptual structure has the matter (as it were) entirely backwards. Recall that before Yangming, Zhuangzi famously said "Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger." It is dangerous and foolish for a relative, and necessarily limited, perspective to pursue absolute objectivity, or claim to possess such a viewpoint. (cf. Ecclesiastes 1:18, 12:12, "Of making books there is no end and much study wearies the body.") Knowledge has lost none of it's importance, but our conceptual understanding of, and relationship to it, has become woefully confused making us vulnerable to the dangerous disease that both these sages warned us of. Knowledge, like facts, are relational. As Blaise Pascal noted, "man naturally cannot see everything"; there is no privileged "third person" perspective to acquire.

Perspectivism in Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite"

The Western origins of perspectivism can be found in the pre-Socratic philosophies of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Protagoras. Heraclitus’ unusual approach aimed to produce readers with a proper grasp of the world and their place in it. Unlike most philosophers, he challenges the right brain rather than the left (cf. Iain McGilchrist). Heraclitus was seen as the representative of universal flux, in contrast to Parmenides, the representative of universal stasis. Plato's rejection and opposition to perspectivism formed a major cornerstone of his philosophy and principal element in his aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and theology. This antiperspectivism made Plato a central target of critique for later perspectival philosophers such as Nietzsche. Who later, as we see, provided inspiration to Viveiros de Castro, who uses the philosophical terminology of Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Deleuze and Guattari in his approach to perspectivism. Nietzsche rejected the notions of absolute truth, external facts, and non-perspectival objectivity. In The Genealogy of Morals he wrote "the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing be." (This was a point frequently made by my professor, Walter Benesch.) Many interdisciplinary connections can (and have been) made. Rovelli notes that Bogdanov anticipated many ideas later popularized by Norbert Wiener, and the General Systems Theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (who influenced the development of process metaphysics and theoretical biology). Bogdanov proposed to unify all social, biological, and physical sciences by considering them as systems of relationships and by seeking the organizational principles that underlie all systems. Nicolas Rashevsky, a physicist turned mathematical biologist who was influenced by Bertalanffy among others, had a strong influence on Robert Rosen, who developed the modeling relation and relational biology (complex systems biology). Arran Gare noted how Rosen's approach lends significant support to the development of biosemiotics. Rosen argued that life itself has to be understood as the product of an interacting system, rather than being the separable parts into which the organism can be broken down. This is an important point of agreement between Rosen and Rovelli (and perhaps Karl Friston, with his emphasis on generalized synchrony). 

Broadly speaking, there is a shared perspective between all these theorists, each in their own way making our concepts "more complete". Peter Corning suggested society is a superorganism. Thomas Metzinger called it a "suprapersonal model". Dennett and Levin proposed that selves can scale into a "superagent". Hanzi Freinacht (Daniel Görtz and Emil Friis) calls this a "transpersonal perspective", referencing Deleuze's comment that society is made up of "dividuals". And John Deely understood relation in its "suprasubjective character". The concept of suprasubjectivity was a means by which C.S. Peirce attempted to resolve (and transcend) an on-going philosophical dispute between those who characterize existence as mind-dependent (ens rationis) and those who characterize it as mind-independent being (ens reale), i.e., between idealist and realist schools of thought. Such an approach tries to reconcile “scientific” (realist/objective) knowledge with humanities subjects (idealist/subjective) interpretations of the world. From a suprasubjective position the concept of a sign is “neither strictly subjective, neither strictly objective.” [Incidentally, according to Peirce all claims about reality are radically subject to error (fallibilism), which is not far from Rovelli's relational interpretation.] There are still more lines of support for multi-scale perspectivism, making “la décolonisation de la pensée” a project we can all embark upon. As Rovelli pointed out in Helgoland, scholars have noted that it is foundational to Mahāyāna Buddhist schools (pratītyasamutpāda doctrine and mūlamadhyamakakārikā text), Jain (anekāntavāda doctrine), Daoist (Zhuangzi famously said "among you, me, and others, none knows which is right"), and other Eastern philosophical traditions. In his book A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Feng Youlan wrote "Philosophy gives no information about matters of fact, and so cannot solve any problems in a concrete and physical way. What it can do, however, is to give man a point of view. From the practical point of view, philosophy is useless, yet it can give us a point of view which is very useful. To use an expression of the Zhuangzi, this is the usefulness of the useless." (115) In the below passage, about how there is ultimately no perspective capable of transcending the totality of all that is, he effectively presaged the relational concepts discussed in Helgoland: 

"I said that philosophy is systematic reflective thinking on life. Because of its reflective nature, it ultimately has to think on "something" that logically cannot be the object of thought. For instance, the universe, because it is the totality of all that is, cannot logically be the object of thought... Since the universe is the totality of all that is, therefore when one thinks about it, one is thinking reflectively, because the thinking and the thinker must also be included in the totality. But when one thinks about that totality, the totality that lies in one's thought does not include the thought itself. For it is the object of the thought and so stands in contrast to it. Hence the totality that one is thinking about is not actually the totality of all that is. Yet one must first think about totality in order to realize that it is unthinkable. One needs thought in order to be conscious of the unthinkable, just as sometimes one needs sound in order to be conscious of silence. One must think about the unthinkable, yet as soon as one tries to do so, it immediately slips away. This is the most fascinating and also most troublesome aspect of philosophy." (337)

We can recall that Schrödinger said that quantum mechanics “deals only with the object–subject relation” and that this is the genesis of Rovelli's relational ontology. Peirce called the physicist's relational ontology "secondness". It is a dyadic relation (the relate and the correlate) characterized by reaction and resistance. (Iain McGilchrist said "Without some degree of resistance, without some degree of opposition, nothing comes into being.") Meanwhile, semioticians in the tradition of C.S. Peirce attempt to answer a different question: "How is it possible for something observed to signify something other than itself?" Is there a relationship between observation and the concept of interpretation within Peircean semiotics? Interpretation is of central concern to the work of Terrance Deacon and the broader biosemiotic community of researchers. Peirce called the semiotician's notion of interpretation "thirdness". It is a triadic relation characterized by representation or mediation. In thirdness, Schrödinger's 'object-subject relation' yields to processes of combinatorial complexity, of differentiation and combination, to form increasingly complex semiotic webs (Hoffmeyer) of 'representamen plus object' that are accessible to cognitive agents at higher 'integrative levels' (Salthe), those typically associated with biological life. There is a developmental structure operating here: thirdness is not possible without secondness. Peirce also imagined what he called "firstness", however physicists like Rovelli have pointed out that since there can be no observation without an observer, we can never observe firstness. As Feng Youlan points out, this would be attempting to "think about the unthinkable". Secondness may in fact be the most primitive ontological structure available for physics to operate with. The notion of pratītyasamutpāda is also that of secondness. Imre Hamar has noted that "In Mahayana thought, particularly Huayan, interdependent causality is understood as a web of causal relations defining reality: to say that something is real is to say that it participates in causal relations with other things that can be said to be real. This approach acknowledges reality [secondness], but not fundamental reality [firstness], and acknowledges causality, but not first cause, thus avoiding the kind of ontological commitment [essentialism] which Buddhism generally takes to be the most proximate cause of suffering. A key doctrine of Huayan is the mutual containment and interpenetration of phenomena or "perfect interfusion." So "How is it possible for something observed to signify something other than itself?" Rovelli points out that a correlation between any two objects only manifests itself in relation to a third. (96) For the concept of meaning to "mean" anything, it must perforce imply the minimal existence of a triadic structure due to the very nature of the process by which a correlation can be recognized.

Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli's perspectivism (and consciousness)

Quentin Ruyant wrote that Rovelli's RQM is "an ontology of observers”, not necessarily human observers, but any physical object, such as a measuring apparatus, would qualify. As Laura Candiotto explained, RQM is a realistic theory that assumes "objects emerge as relational “nodes” or intersections of the relevant relations. Those nodes emerge from the web of relations, not the opposite." This requires a figure-ground shift in perspective, as Fritjof Capra noted in his book "The Web of Life". Rovelli earlier proposed that the flow of time itself reflects a particular perspective on the universe, not an essential characteristic of the universe itself. "We, in every moment of our experience, are situated within time", Rovelli writes. And therefore it may be that entropy "measures something that relates to us more than to the cosmos". Only our experience produces the impression of past, present, and future. Lee Smolin had earlier proposed that the fundamental laws of nature evolve irreversibly, but evolution is perspectival as well and is therefore concordant with RQM. To review, every "thing" is a perspective or view (Candiotto's relational "nodes"), including observers and time, all of which are only partial views of a larger web of relations. Now, let's incorporate Smolin's causal theory of views (CTV) within this context. 

Smolin explained during an interview that every event has a "view" of the world, which is all the information about how it fits into the rest of the world, including all the energy and momentum was that was propagated to it. “I can hypothesize that all that exists in the world is views and a process that continually makes new views out of old views. That's what I call the causal theory of views. The universe is a collection of partial views, because each of these is just part of the universe of itself. That's all the universe is, fundamentally, in this story.” In “The Autodidactic Universe”, (access papers) Smolin and coauthors use the same metaphor as Candiotto. They wrote: "The simplest mathematical model of a fully relational system is a graph; we can think of a graph as a representation of a universe of relations: it is a closed system, defined only by the patterns of links, each defining an elementary relation between the two nodes at its ends. Each node of a graph has its view of the universe, which is characterized by how it is connected." In “Temporal relationalism”, Smolin wrote: "Two nearby objects have similar views of the rest of the universe. Here by 'view' I mean, informally, what you see when you look around, i.e. the sky from your point of view. Think of the pattern of stars seen on the sky from a particular event’s perspective, i.e. the pattern of incoming radiation on the sphere which is the space of directions on your backwards light cone. What if distance in spacetime is only a proxy for difference of views? What if the locality that matters fundamentally is the distance in the space of views? This means that two events are more likely to interact when their views are similar." In "The place of qualia in a relational universe" Smolin wrote, "Conscious perceptions are aspects of some views. A physically based selection principle selects which views have experiential aspects." 

The connection between RQM or CTV and consciousness is very tempting to make. Earlier this year James Ladyman asked Rovelli, "Carlo, you think that there are ethical and political implications for how we live from this relational way of thinking, is that right?" He responded, "For me it definitely resonates. If we think in terms of relations that build societies instead of as individuals, groups, nations, or continents that compete, everything would work much better." And elsewhere, "I could never separate physics and philosophy from our actual attitudinal stance toward life, because when we believe something it just immediately affects what we are. We cannot separate things." Philip Goff, the well known panpsychist, recently invited an interdisciplinary conversation between himself and others. Among the participants were Anil Seth, Carlo Rovelli, and Lee Smolin. Rovelli's essay, "Relations and Panpsychism", is not yet available to read, however we do have Goff's response to it. Goff wrote: "As Rovelli says, his favoured interpretation of quantum mechanics is essentially ‘perspectival.’ Having a ‘perspective’ seems to imply having experience, or something on the way towards it. But this is just a reflection of ambiguity in the word ‘perspective’. We sometimes say that something ‘has a perspective’ to mean that there is something that it’s like to be it, that it experiences. But when in relational quantum mechanics (RQM) we say that a system ‘has a perspective’, we mean something quite different: that the theory cannot be applied to systems in isolation but only in relation to each other. Accepting that physical systems ‘have perspectives’ in the RQM sense is totally consistent with physical systems not ‘having perspectives’ in the experiential sense. ...even if RQM could close the ‘subjectivity gap’ – the gap between the processes of physical science and the having of experience – this would still leave the ‘qualitativity gap’ – the gap between the quantitative features of physical science and the qualities of experience – as wide as ever." 

Goff was apparently unable to make the conceptual leap that a relational understanding of reality implies. Toward the end of Helgoland, in the subsection "The world seen from within", Rovelli explains: "In order to understand the relation between our mental life and the physical world, it is essential to take into account the fact that we describe the physical world from the outside, while our mental activity is experienced in the first person, from within. But the rethinking of the world suggested by quantum physics, it seems to me, changes the terms of the question. If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. Our perspectives on the world, our points of view, are all from inside. They are all in the first person. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. If the qualities of an object are born from the interaction with something else, then the distinction between mental and physical phenomena fades considerably. Subjectivity is not a qualitative leap, but a growth in complexity. The relational perspective distances us from subject/object and matter/spirit dualisms, and from the apparent irreducibility of the reality/thought or brain/consciousness dualism." Seth's article, "The real problem(s) with panpsychism" supports this view: "It could be that a richer picture of matter itself might further deepen the resources of materialism. For example, the ‘relational’ interpretation of quantum mechanics argues that the fundamental nature of matter is in the form of interactions. It is conceivable, though by no means guaranteed, that adopting such a perspective may in the long run change one’s views about the possibilities of materialist explanations – not only of consciousness, but of many other phenomena too." And Lee Smolin, in his response titled "Physics, time and qualia" with coauthor Clelia Verde describe "a phenomenology of present events. Nothing exists or persists, things only happen. The universe is indefinite and under-determined. What we mean by becoming or “to happen” is for something indefinite to become definite. This is what we call an event. The quantities that become definite at an event are called the view of the event. The views are real." Earlier Smolin stated: "The universe consists of a dynamically evolving collection of partial views of itself." (A slightly more concise phrasing than the original one sentence summary in the concluding chapter of his 2019 book "Einstein's Unfinished Revolution".) Lee Smolin is perhaps the most Taoist physicist, moreso than Bohr or Capra. As Brook Ziporyn wrote: "There are three intertwined themes at the heart of Zhuangzi's project: transformation, dependence, and perspective. A being is simply a perspective, and the way perspectives transform into other perspectives is the heart of the matter. The Dao is the ceaseless generation of new perspectives.” Depending on how we interpret this, that could be a fair summary of both Smolin and Zhuangzi. There are many other interdisciplinary links that may be made. A physiosemiotic interpretation of Smolin's causal theory of views could provide some of the theoretical framework for understanding processes of self reflective awareness, transformation, and regulation of attention, enabling us to identify, select, and cultivate those views with the greatest developmental potential (physiological/psychological states; see L.F. Barrett below). This could help to address the "information war" described below. Howard Odum's systems ecology and science of energy quality might also be usefully reconceptualized along CTV terms. There are likely many other possible extensions of these ideas that are capable of generating new insights in existing fields of research. 

During Rovelli's presentation on 6/2/21 for the annual Mike Jackson Lecture on Systems Thinking he noted that relational quantum mechanics (RQM) describes how systems manifest themselves in interactions. He was clear that this is "relational or relative (perspectivism), not subjective. It does not depend on the knowledge of a subject, it is rather about the structure of relational phenomena." As far as I am aware, no other physicist has explicitly connected QM to perspectivism. Admittedly, Rovelli is not presenting his work as that of a philosopher, and perspectivism has taken on a variety of (sometimes conflicting) interpretations, but this raises questions. If reality is fundamentally perspectivist, then the question of continuity, “What is the nature of the relationships among the diversity of perspectives?” is critical. How we define an individual, and draw a boundary around it, determines to a great degree the qualities and nature of its constitutive relations or perspective. And this perspective may be nearer or further from that of others (here Smolin's CTV may be useful as it suggests a way to measure the 'distance' between views). As these perspectives interact collectively they may form a local consensus and draw nearer, eventually forming a composite suprapersonal perspective. There appears to be a fractal nature to all these relative relations, with no discernible point of reference for where they begin or end. This illustrates how, like semiotics, several of the interpretations of QM have tried to account for, or at least gesture toward, an explanation of the agentic qualities of living organisms. Smolin makes a special effort to emphasize causality, but whether or not CTV is an improvement over RQM is unclear. It represents one attempt (accurate or not) to grapple with exactly what an “ontology of observers” might imply. Rovelli comes very near the foundational concerns of biosemiotics in regard to healing the Cartesian wound by conceptually reuniting observer/observed (terminology of physics), or mind/matter (terminology of biosemiotics). He even pointed out that a correlation between any two objects only manifests itself in relation to a third (Helgoland p96). This is a key concept within Peircean biosemiotics, where in order for meaning to "mean" anything, it minimally implies the existence of a triadic structure due to the very nature of the process by which a correlation can be recognized. The deep insight within relational explanations is that there are no isolated entities, no ‘things’, and thus no atomistic self/ego. We exist only in relation. And that realization comes with an enormous responsibility to prevent narrow, absolutist interpretations from dominating cultural interactions, and to redirect attention toward situationally appropriate responses. There is a risk of reifying the binary relativism/absolutism distinction, and making relativism an absolutism itself. So what is needed is an understanding of ‘relativity’, which emphasizes the value of each contextually unique contributing perspective.  

Much depends on the specific role of these perspectives, the 'observer' in quantum mechanics, and how that shapes the various interpretations. In his 2019 book, Lee Smolin wrote “if relational quantum theory had a slogan, it would be ‘many partial viewpoints define a single universe’. Divide the world in two with a boundary as defining a system. What is real is always defined relative to a split of the world that defines an observer.” That was his (more or less fair) characterization of Rovelli’s RQM. Because every view implies a split, a boundary, an epistemic cut between observer and observed, there is no observational point that is not itself a part of ‘the totality of all that is’. Consequently, the ‘God’s eye view’ is impossible. This is only a problem for those desirous of perfect objectivity, a temptation that has always proved a stumbling block for the ‘left hemisphere’. Interestingly, it is important to note that boundaries, enabling constraints, and so on are concepts that are central to biosemiotics, tools employed to “call forth new strategies, behaviors, interactions and relationships within the semiosphere.” (Donald Favareau) And although they prevent perfect objectivity, these are all very useful instrumental tools for the left hemisphere, so long as the right hemisphere maintains control and sees the larger context of how each could potentially help or harm the integrity and relational dynamics of the greater whole. Through the attempt to locate mind (observer) within matter (observed), or more precisely to bring them together (Jung's 'mysterium coniunctionis' or syzygy), both biosemiotics and physics seem to have found that we are neither of these per se, insofar as they are conceived as ‘things’. Rather we are the 'dynamically evolving partial views', the reciprocally reflecting relational processes that are fundamentally incomplete (referencing Deacon's Incomplete Nature). And as such we gain a trans-perspectival understanding, no longer seeing ourselves as isolated and alone, but living within the context of an interconnected web of supportive relationships (alterity) that extend outward across space and time. 

When Lee Smolin said that by 'view' he meant "the pattern of incoming radiation on the sphere you see when you look around, the space of directions on your backwards light cone", it helped clarify what Carl Sagan meant when he said "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself". Other physicists have pointed out that we know the cosmos from the inside, from the standpoint of being within it. This is inescapable. Our perspective upon it is necessarily finite and limited, but we will always be held in its embrace. And though death may transform us, we are never separated. We can depend upon this actual interdependence, and perhaps for some it can be a source of comfort. There is also a potential transformation that can be a source of hope. We have the ability to unite our partial interior views, join them together with others, and gain a broader understanding. If we can do this, we can more easily direct our attention to those aspects of the world most appropriate to our needs (technically speaking, we can escape local optima for a relatively more global optima). In other words, while each perspective can at times appear ‘sufficient unto itself’ (Timaeus) and indeed this is a feature of information warfare, by the light of self reflection or an analysis from a broader trans-perspectival understanding, individual perspectives are ‘imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete’. We can call this view “wabisabi perspectivism”. The limitations of wabisabi perspectives can be transcended via a fractal multi-perspective understanding of the sort described by Rovelli, Smolin, Zhuangzi, and others. McGilchrist effectively spells out the psychological and cultural implications of this realization better than I can, and these turn many of the prevailing assumptions of contemporary culture on their head, demanding a thorough reassessment of our relationships with each other and the greater world around us. It is these ethical implications that motivate this work, and it might be possible to develop some of them further through linkages to existing scholarship within the field. The connection between our culture, philosophy, society, and environment is impossible to ignore, so any solution that addresses one but leaves the others untouched may not be sufficient. Once we have grasped the interdependence of perspectives, our work is the same as that described in chapter six of Zhuangzi: "Do not disturb the process of transformation!"

Mauro Dorato draws out a surprising conclusion: "It follows that if S is the whole universe, then, qua isolated system, also S is an absolute system with potentially infinite, purely dispositional properties that, lacking any external stimulus, cannot be manifested. Nothing can interact with the quantum universe S in principle, for there is no external observer. Consequently, the quantum universe S can be only partially known by interacting with parts of it from within, namely by dividing it into two parts, one of which, the observer O, must be contained in S. If the quantum universe can be described only from within, we must somehow consider all the possible compatible perspectives about it, each of which depends on a cut of the universe into two parts, a system and an observer and the way the exchange information. The consequence of this is of momentous importance: Rovelli’s relational approach to quantum mechanics entails that the quantum state of the universe cannot be known! Another, more dramatic instance of the impossibility of self-measurement of a quantum system!" 

Laudisa and Rovelli write "The central move of RQM is to interpret all physical variables as relational, namely as referring to two systems, not a single one, and to view them as realised only in interactions." Unlike QBist's interpretations of quantum theory, which are agent-centered (probability-centered per von Baeyer, p230), or Bohmian interpretations, which imply an underlying "absolute" system state, in RQM the relation "is symmetric, a simple consequence of the hypothesis that agents and systems are on the same level [these are assumed to be equivalent, there is no observer-observed distinction]. Relationality has been playing an ever dominant role as our knowledge of the natural world has increased." We have also seen that the Active Inference formulation of Karl Friston describes a symmetrical view of exchanges between agent and environment (see also perception–action cycle). Like Ladyman's OSR, Rovelli's RQM is another step in this direction. The philosophical implications of relationally weaken a strong version of realism. "This is in a direction similar to what happened with Galilean or Einstein’s relativity, but more radical. For RQM, the lesson of quantum theory is that the description of the way distinct physical systems affect each other when they interact (and not the way physical systems ‘are’) exhausts all that can be said about the physical world. This suggests that the notion of 'substance', which plays a major role in western philosophy, might be inappropriate to account for this science; perhaps the idea of mutual dependency (Nāgārjuna) may offer a relevant philosophical cadre." The Bohmian interpretation provides a useful contrast with RQM. Kofler and Zeilinger wrote that the nonlocal hidden variables of Bohmian mechanics "have to be, in principle, unobservable". For Rovelli, these Bohmian hidden variables are, at bottom, a misguided attempt to salvage metaphysical assumptions such as naive realism and determinism, the idea that "reality has to be real and universal, and the same for everybody" (Rovelli 1996). Einstein was also troubled by quantum mechanic's apparent failure to respect these principles. But there are no indications on physical grounds that these metaphysical assumptions are valid. As Rovelli wrote: "The issue is thus not to replace or fix [quantum mechanics], but rather to understand what precisely it says about the world". Quantum theory is telling us, fundamentally, that systems are always relative to other systems. I empathize with Bohm’s motivation to explain explicate fragmentation in terms of implicate wholeness. Foundationalism was apparently important throughout his life (see Gardner’s “David Bohm and Jiddo Krishnamurti”). But despite it’s appeal, there’s no such Archimedean point. Our limited perspectives are most frustrating and cause the most harm when they aspire to absolutism. Living within both our material and epistemic limits is the challenge.

The parable of the blind men and the elephant illustrates this well. In his book "Physics and philosophy", Werner Heisenberg summarized it this way: "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Each blind man in the story has a limited, relative perspective on the elephant. It's not that their judgments are wrong, but that all of them are right "from a perspective". In some versions of the story, they later have a chance to compare observations and each experiences a transformation to a broader perspective on the elephant. "So that's what an elephant is!" they exclaim. We may ask: Do they now know the true nature of an elephant? The answer is no. If anything, they have merely gained an improved perspective. A potentially infinite number of viewpoints remain to be discovered. There is always more they can learn. And so out of necessity, people simply stop when their perspective is "good enough". For anyone to think that they have arrived at a complete understanding would be a mistake. This might lead one to conclude that, if no one observes the truth directly, then instead of arguing over what the elephant is, would it not be better to understand how each different perspective emerges from a unique context and standpoint, and how these transform as a result of interacting with each other? 

In "Planck and the Consciousness Puzzle" a discussion held earlier this year that attempted to explore the possible connections between quantum mechanics (QM) and neurophilosophy, Amanda Gefter, in my view, made the most interesting contributions. Among the participants, she was perhaps the most familiar with those interpretations of QM that take the relationship between observer and observed to be the central, defining feature. This dynamic has formed the subtext of QM since its earliest days with Planck, and today it is still the core principle to be explained within the work of many physicists, including N. David Mermin, Lee Smolin, Carlo Rovelli, and Chris Fuchs, to name just a few. So how might QM and neurophilosophy be related? Gefter gave the example of 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended), and alluded to Gibson's ecological psychology and Karl Friston's Active Inference Framework. Notions such as 'grip' and 'alignment' all take the interplay between mind and matter to be fundamental to experience. This is "the kind of reality that's afforded by quantum mechanics". Here's a bit of the exchange that occurred during the discussion: 

Catherine Heymans (moderator): "Most of us, scientists included, see physics as an attempt to provide an objective description of the world independent of human subjectivity and consciousness yet Max Planck, one of the major scientific figures of the 20th century and the founder of quantum mechanics, stated as a result of his investigations and experiments "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness." Should we listen to Planck? Can we plausibly see matter as a derivative of consciousness? Might doing so help solve the deep puzzles facing contemporary physics and overcome the hard problem of consciousness itself? ...Amanda Gefter, is consciousness fundamental?"

Amanda Gefter: "I don't think consciousness is fundamental, but I don't think matter is fundamental either. Throughout history we've sort of bounced between these two extremes - either everything is mind or everything is matter - and I think quantum mechanics actually can help us sort of break the stalemate... Subject and object are profoundly coupled; they're sort of stuck together. They define each other in this kind of contextual way through interaction." 

Brian Greene: "All I think is that there's stuff. Sometimes that stuff accumulates into what we call an observer. Sometimes that stuff accumulates into what we call an object. And stuff interacts with stuff via the laws of quantum mechanics. There's a lot about that interaction that we understand. There's a lot however that still remains to be fully understood. ...Is a photon an observer? Is a single particle an observer? Stuff interacts with stuff... I don't think that human experience is vital to that at all. I don't think that the world fundamentally changed when a humanoid species on planet Earth evolved to the point that it had conscious awareness and thereby could undertake an observation and record a result. I don't think that was a fundamental moment in physical understanding of reality."

Amanda Geftner: "There's a kind of 'perspectivism' in quantum mechanics. You can no longer give a definite third person objective description... You can't get all the way back to a classical, objective, non-contextual, description of just "stuff interacting with stuff" in a completely context-independent way. I think that's really important. I don't think it means humans, or minds, are anything special... What quantum mechanics tells us is that to observe something we interact with it, and so we are physical 'subsystems' of the universe - we physically interact in embodied ways with other subsystems of the universe in a kind of perspectival, contextual manner that you can't describe from a third person point of view."

K'un-Peng

Zhuangzi's perspectivism

The Japanese concept of wabisabi is described by Leonard Koren as beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". This aesthetic developed through the influence of Zen. And Zen was in turn influenced by the confluence in China of Buddhist thought (where the characteristics of existence are impermanence, suffering, and emptiness) with Daoist thought. As an aside, according to Xunzi the mind is empty, unified, and still when it is in accord with the Dao. Concerning Daoism, Brook Ziporyn wrote that "there are three intertwined themes at the heart of Zhuangzi's project: transformation, dependence, and perspective." I would slightly modify this triad. Zhuangzi’s wabisabi observer-observed (perspectives) can be understood as a dialectic within and between three pairs of opposite qualities: one-many (composed of fractal parts, infinite continua, internally differentiating aspects), independent-interdependent (contextuality of relations, pathos and ethics, causality, logical connectives, etc.), and rest-motion (in the process of continuous change, flux, transformation). So how do contextually situated, partial perspectives transform? We can look to ancient philosophy both East and West for an answer. The concept of change and the unity of opposites characterized the thought of Heraclitus. A few phrases he was credited with include: "hen diapheron heautôi" (the one differentiated in itself), and "panta rhei" (everything flows). The first phrase acknowledges that our partial perspectives do clearly divide us from each other (as the left hemisphere readily avers). But it also suggests that perspectives, as inherently relational processes, point to a deeper unity that, though hidden from the left hemisphere, is discernable by the 'higher point of view' of the right hemisphere (McGilchrist). Concerning Heraclitus' teachings on flux, John Burnet (1930) wrote: "Nothing ever is, everything is becoming"; "All things are in motion like streams"; "All things are passing, and nothing abides". The ebb and flow of a braided stream is also a metaphor to understand the dynamic and fluid nature of evolution and our genetic heritage. A mighty torrent fans out into numerous rivulets before merging again, now here, now there. The waves rise over the rocks and boulders, and spill over the falls. And when it reaches its terminus in the sea, it evaporates, falls on the mountains, and the cycle repeats once more. Carl Jung thought Heraclitus was marvelous, though over the course of development of Western philosophy (epecially its modern expression, as described by McGilchrist) Heraclitus' views seemed increasingly paradoxical and obscure. Thales considered water as the arche, the fundamental element that united all things. Laozi used water as a metaphor for Dao: “Dao in the world may be compared to rivers and streams running into the sea” (chap. 32); and “The Great Tao flows everywhere. It may go left or right. All things depend on it for life” (chap. 34). This is how perspectives transform: everything flows, and it completes a process-relational understanding of Carlo Rovelli's QM perspectivism (relational quantum mechanics), and Lee Smolin's causal theory of views. How matter and energy flows in ecosystems was also the concern of Howard Odum and his energy hierarchy.

On one hand, what Zhuangzi has to tell us may seem fairly obvious, as it is borne out by experience. We are aware of the limitations of bounded rationality, we recognize the need to understand changing contexts, and we have become all too familiar with the everpresent danger that a narrow and intolerant perspective presents when it gains power and influence, wreaking havoc due to its inability to appreciate its own limitations. But on the other hand, our failure to heed the implications of all this makes Zhuangzi’s insights even more relevant today than they were over two millennia ago. In his article about Zhuangzi for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Chad Hansen wrote (paraphrasing): “Epistemic modesty undergirds Zhuangzi’s openness and willingness to interact with others. There are no naturally ideal observers. No judgment comes from some point outside of or everywhere within the maze or network of dàos (paths) presented by nature. There is no final or ultimately broad perspective from which we can make judgments. We are one among many natural creatures (as natural as monkeys, birds, and fish) with different capacities, choosing paths from their indexed point in space and time, and limited in the sense that there is no behavior from the point of view of the whole, no omniscient perspective on the path structure. Paths are in nature but not choices of nature for us. So the discussion, competition, and even strife between paths and their advocates are factors in an ongoing, natural guiding process. Dialogue is part of the natural process of path construction and making them available to others.

"We and our circumstances change as we each find, choose and walk different naturally evolving paths, but this does not entail we should not advocate our own way. Realizing this, we should not flatter ourselves, posing as the Confucian father shaping his child’s character, but rather as a contributor in this competition among similarly natural ways. We are all naturally influenced by others’ evaluations, their judgments of our choices and their behavioral virtuosity — especially when the others are our parents, perceived superiors and respected models. We each express perspectives located in a real world of indexed points from which we choose behavioral paths. We may judge others as correct or incorrect from our own present perspective. We need not judge that all are good choices for those following them — only that the grounds of their choice may be different from ours. They might still be dogmatic, careless, or unwarranted even given the situational grounds of their choice. Nothing about the naturalness of how our choices arise makes them right.

"We may wonder if we have discovered all the available paths. And we may always wonder if our judgment about which is best now is about the best in the long run. But all we can substitute for this global perspective is some local consensus. There may be occasions when we experience a gestalt broadening of perspective as revealing something real and significant (like waking from a dream), but we cannot extrapolate from that to claim to know the direction and final result of such gestalt leaps to broader perspectives or a final state of knowing what to do. Zhuangzi’s relativism is mildly skeptical because he cannot know either that there is not, nor that there is, a final or ultimate “awakening”. Credulous, dogmatic and imperious absolutists do not appreciate themselves as being one of a variety of natural perspectives. Zhuangzi ridiculed the social moralists of his time for the narrowness of their range of choices — their failure to appreciate the richness and complexity of alternative ways of life and their paternalistic, superior attitude toward other points of view."

It was in his introduction to Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings that Brook Ziporyn introduced his conception of the three intertwined themes at the heart of Zhuangzi's project, he explaind: "One way in which he illustrates this is with the story of tones emerging from the hollows in the woods during a windstorm. Each tone is different; the wind is blowing forth a wide variety of divergent sounds, all of which are equally "the sound of the wind." Which among all these varied sounds is the wind itself, the wind's "own" sound? Which sound more adequately represents "the sound of wind" than any other? The implicit answer is that the sound of wind is not discoverable anywhere but in these individual tones, none of which is a privileged representation of the sound of wind." Reflecting on the chapter in which this appears, chapter two of the Zhuangzi, which begins with "Can you really make the body like a withered tree and the mind like dead ashes?", Edward Slingerland suggested that there may have been some inspiration from the use of psychoactive drugs involved. It may not be possible to rule that out. Michael Pollan has described how a "guided psilocybin session" can cause people to experience an increase in the personality trait of openness, described as "openness to other people’s views, openness to new experience, openness to new ideas". As he said, "psychedelics create this opening, this plastic moment where people can reexamine themselves and get some perspective on their habitual ways of thinking and doing. New connections are made that can produce new insights, new perspectives, new ways of looking at the world.”

Ziporyn again: "Why is it that the source of varying perspectives, a fixed single real identity, can never be discovered? This brings us to the crux of Zhuangzi's argument. Zhuangzi claims that the way we see things, the way we consciously know, is itself determined by our perspective, our mood. But the question about the origin of this way of seeing things is posed as part of that way of seeing things. The question about where moods and perspectives come from is posed from within some particular perspective; a perspective is attempting to see and verify its own becoming. However, Mood X cannot witness its own transition from not being there to being there, for by definition it cannot be there to view what preceded its own emergence. Whatever it sees and knows is ipso facto a part of the world that exists after its emergence—the world of anger, the world of joy—not the preexisting cause or source of that emergence. Knowledge of the source of X would require an ability to stand outside of X. It might try to get around this problem by drawing conclusions about its preexistent source based on inferences rather than direct witnessing. But this conclusion and the premises of the inferential procedures that produce it do not really stand outside of X; they are themselves manifestations or aspects of X's own experience, internal to it. Since all assertions about the origin of a perspective are internal to that perspective, there is no perspective-independent way of verifying their reliability, or of adjudicating between conflicting accounts. 

Ziporyn concludes: "For Zhuangzi, the way perspectives transform into other perspectives is the heart of the matter, and the Dao is the ceaseless generation of new perspectives. We may say that a being is simply a perspective, and the constant becoming of perspective after perspective, each constitutively unable to know anything outside itself, reveals nothing more or less than the obvious unknownness of what is ultimately so, or right, or source, or purpose." In the many parables, such as The Butterfly Dream or The Joy of Fish in Zhuangzi, these themes leap out at the reader. The Joy of Fish (chapter 17) highlights that we have a perspective on the perspectives of others (much like the quantum physics thought experiment “Wigner’s friend”):

“Zhuangzi and Hui Shi wandered over the Hao River bridge. Zhuangzi said, “those mini-fish coming from there and cruising around, relaxed and unhurried, are fish at leisure.” Hui Shi said “You are not a fish; from whence do you know the leisure of fish?” Zhuangzi retorted, “You are not me, from what perspective do you know my not knowing fish at leisure?” Hui Shi responds, “I’m not you, of course I don’t know about you; You are not a fish and that’s enough to count as you’re not knowing fish’s leisure.” Zhuangzi concludes, “Let’s return to where we started. When you said ‘from what perspective do you know fish at leisure’, you clearly knew my knowing it as you asked me. I knew it here above the Hao.”

There are qualitative differences between perspectives, and these can reveal a sort of hierarchical structure. For Zhuangzi, this was made explicit in his comparison of the great bird and the little bird and the breadth of their relative viewpoints as they viewed the ground from different heights. The perspectival conception of objectivity used by Nietzsche sees the deficiencies of each perspective as remediable by a study of the differences between them. More recently, Iain McGilchrist noted the need for context and depth within perspectives (notably lacking in most contemporary political dialogue). He provides one of the best analyses of the qualitative characteristics of perspective I have yet seen. And so, the criticism that relativism, at least to the degree that it is synonymous with perspectivism, yields a flat and undiscriminating ontology (which is a popular criticism leveled against 'standpoint epistemology' and theorists like Latour) does not really hold up under analysis. Or, if relativism as a term is beyond rehabilitation, perhaps perspectival pluralism could suffice. Relativism is of course relatively defined, the same goes for perspectivism, relationalism, etc. For a significant number of people these terms are self-refuting and suggest an "anything goes" orientation. But of course that is not what perspectivists like Zhuangzi meant at all, and I think it reveals a particularly naive understanding of a very wide family of concepts that could be grouped under the umbrella term of 'relativism'. For instance, if we take the term 'subjectivism', we could say “If everything is ultimately subjective, then all value judgements are equivalent". However John Deely defined a 'suprasubjective', the subjective relationship to the multiple subjectivies to which we relate, that corresponds to a higher subjective understanding. We could call that a 'trans-perspectival' understanding. He was following a path parallel to Zhuangzi, whose central message was to develop the potential to have a 'perspective on perspectives' (the point Brook Ziporyn forcefully made). And from that much more becomes possible. So just as we cannot abandon the notion of subjectivity to naive conceptual understanding, it would be unfortunate to do the same with relativism; even biosemiosis would become a casualty. 

An inability to understand and develop a more nuanced popular conception of relativism and relationship is a consequence of the Western mind which has struggled to shake off a fascination with Platonic Forms (with a few notable exceptions, again see McGilchrist for more on that). For Plato, objective truth resides in a non-perspectival domain, so emerging from the cave simply must be possible otherwise relativism would not be defeated. He needs an essentialist, absolutist foundation to build upon. Camus wanted desperately to emerge from the cave, but realizing he could not, turned instead to the Myth of Sisyphus to answer the question "Does the realization of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide?" Camus' philosophy of absurdism was entirely a salvage operation. It was valiant, but no one was completely satisfied with absurdist philosophy. And so, now suicide (nihilism) is the unspoken, and generally unacknowledged, planetary policy. So if we ask "How can breadth deal with the relativism charge?", another answer is that the prevailing alternative of insisting upon absolutist foundations has led to self-destructive ideologies. Of course, perspectivism certainly could as well! For although Nietzsche correctly made Plato a central target of critique, he unfortunately advocated for a form of "egoistic perspectivism" rather than Zhuangzi's multi-perspectivism. Bret Davis wrote how, in the hands of later Eastern philosophers this developed into a very keen understanding of perspectival delimitation. Walter Benesch was significantly inspired by Zhuangzi to articulate an aspect/perspective philosophy; as Dogen wrote, "when one side is illuminated, the other is dark". In "Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings", Brook Ziporyn summarized some of the views and philosophical flow of the book: 

"Small and large, use and value, recognized identities and status, these are relative to surrounding conditions, to the position one occupies. For holders of divergent ideas about what is right to be carping back and forth, judging one another, ignores that dependence of valuation on its conditions, and forecloses a possibility of greater flexibility in transforming from one such function and value to another. In fact, this relativity of value to position and prior condition is deep and thoroughgoing. It actually extends beyond questions of value even to the most fundamental ontological questions, the question of who or what any given entity is. This leads not to the solipsism of the ordinary skeptic but to the mutual transformation of any tentatively posited identity and its putatively paired opposite, the opening up of each position into every other, with large and attractive consequences. For one thing, not letting putative knowledge direct the process of transformation, of life and activity, can be seen in a certain sense to enhance adaptive life skills in dramatic ways, and concomitantly to free us of concern with fame and disgrace, even with life and death, which anecdotally seem to be among the key blockages to really virtuosic living. In fact I could tell you some stories about people who have thoroughly abandoned all putative knowledge about values, about what is right, about facts, about what is so, and thus also all projects and plans, and yet who seem to have a mysteriously dramatic effect on others, even when everything else about them - physically, mentally, and morally — is, to all appearances, completely worthless. The total and thoroughgoing absence of all merit, beauty, skill, and purpose attracts and changes people, as still water allows people to view their own reflections, thereby fascinating, revealing, and transforming them. 

So identify with all transformation, hide the world in the world, simultaneously follow both Heaven and man, never knowing to hate death or love life, swooshing along in the great Transforming Openness, swooshing along all the better for never knowing who or what causes it or why, or what it really is. This will dispel the pretensions of seers, shamans, and savants who claim to know who you are or should be, or who or what anything else is or should be. Be mirrorlike, and don't let your primal chaos be killed by these pretensions to know and fix things into one definite identity or another. It's all about the transformation of things, but sometimes you have to deal with knowledge, order, morality, family, government, and all the other sociopolitical roles that bestow relatively fixed identities. People are always trying to use some one-sided technique to master the world, to know it, identify it, and commodify it. They think they have knowledge of the vast form, the total form — but really each of them is just a fragment of the vastness, of the endless and indeterminable whole. And yet they are also right in a way: each of them is the vastness of unevadable transformation, which is everywhere; it’s just that knowledge and values take one piece and stretch it too far, and take it out of communication with all the other parts and aspects and forms of it. This is true for all the various philosophical, moral, and social thinkers of the world — even me, Zhuang Zhou, but really I'm just tossing forth a tangled cluster of jokes and baubles, unsettling and unsettlable questions to spur on the endlessness of the transformation of meanings and identities."

Chad Hansen introduced the novel assumption that Zhuangzi was a philosopher of language and mind, of interpretation and meaning. This may suggest some interesting connections between Zhuangzi's perspectivism and biosemiotics. Furthermore, it places Zhuangzi near the center of our philosophical story here, with physicists like Rovelli providing supporting evidence from the periphery. Brook Ziporyn above suggested that Zhuangzi's relativity "leads not to the solipsism of the ordinary skeptic, but to the mutual transformation of any tentatively posited identity". I believe Descartes was the archtypal skeptic to which Ziporyn refers. Regarding the world of the 'right hemisphere' as described by Iain McGilchrist, Descartes was very skeptical. So when confronted with relativity, he viewed it as a problem to be contained and eliminated, and much less to be understood. As a result he focused on a reductive and fixed account of knowledge. But confronted with the same problem, Zhuangzi sought to understand relativity and was skeptical of the world that the 'left hemisphere' revealed, so he produced a relational account of knowledge that accomodates processes of change, growth, and transformation. The correct relativist-skepticist posture per Zhuangzi, as Hansen explained, is not that our judgments are wrong, but that all of them are right "from a perspective". So for any actual perspective from which we make judgments, there we will find some language that is appropriate, and some that is not appropriate. As Benesch put it, the key in all this is "accommodating the ‘mind of the observer’ as an aspect of the ‘nature of the observed’ in the process of observation". We inquire about the aspects of the world that can be revealed to us, each from our unique perspectives.

Donella Meadows and Paul Hawken's perspectivism (or Xunzi redux)

Perspective is the hardest thing to find in life, and the most precious gift we can give the next generation. A trustworthy perspective allows us to get through the day to day challenges, and an exceptional one might even help to prepare us for the unknown. Perhaps a holistic perspective was our earliest and most natural living experience. Can we move from an anthropocentric to a more ecocentric perspective (which as I understand it is also an Indigenous perspective)? This is a question that invites us to form, like Zhuangzi, a “perspective on perspectives”. We can see a continuum or spectrum of views. Modernity has overlaid upon our native holism additional information and models that may either contribute to reinforcing it, or alternatively fracture and break it apart. What promotes unity? What agitates and divides, taking us down one of many blind alleys off the central pathway? On one extreme are those viewpoints that are generally fatalistic and don't believe we are capable of producing a beneficial outcome on the global scene (perhaps these are partially a consequence of the sort of dynamics McGilchrist highlighted). But there are also ideas about how to change cultural thinking processes and usher in a more socially responsible ecocentrism, a rebirth. Who can articulate, interrogate, and implement, per Hansen, "behavior that skillfully follows a natural path"? 

Scientists have been very clear that we need to stay away from tipping points in the climate system to avoid ecological collapses, an impoverished future and, in the worst case, a potentially irrecoverable planetary phase transition. Recently David Roberts noted "To hold temperature rise to less than 1.5° or 2°C this century will require enormous, heroic decarbonization efforts." The uncertainty surrounding when these events may occur definitely should prompt the sort of "heroic decarbonization efforts" required to avoid them. And yet, according to most observers, heroic efforts are simply not forthcoming (David Simon pointedly called our government "inert" and incapable of action in its current form). This produces a form of cognitive dissonance. Perfectionists, who cannot change the reality of political inaction and reduce the dissonant thoughts this situation gives rise to, instead change their beliefs about the necessity of action. That frees them to find some other goal, one that they believe is obtainable and consistent with their (now slightly altered) worldview, and pursue that instead. The retreat from reality to ever more constricted and abstract spheres of interaction further drives the resulting asynchronous relationships toward dissolution. A predictable pattern repeatedly unfolds: when perfection is found to be unobtainable, an "all or nothing" vacillation between fantasy and nihilism results. When progress toward realizing the vision of an ecological civilization (or any other goal) happens to stall or reverse, the Western mind tends to flip to nihilistic pessimism, renounce the goal, and pivot attention elsewhere. National attention on advancing climate change shifts to space tourism, or some other subject in line with the prevailing culture and its more extreme forms of expression (conservative, libertarian, individualist, and escapist), and we are collectively lulled into a sort of fatuous optimism. This mindset is far too brittle and inflexible to survive under conditions of rapid change. It refuses to engage until, that is, reality agrees to its terms of engagement. Of course reality does no such thing. The laws of physics are unforgiving. Roberts reminds us, "Our only choice is the proportions of the mix: action vs. impacts. The less action we and other countries take to address the threat, the more impacts we will all suffer." We must engage with reality on its own terms, not ours, despite any dissonance we may feel. We must abandon any pretense to perfection, adopt epistemic humility, and view all action along a continuum with varying proportions of action vs. impacts. Here, where we stand is as important as what we see, and along this continuum exist the tipping points for various species, societies, and ecosystems (Quaternary megafauna, genocides, ozone depletion, coral reefs, glaciation, rainforests, permafrost, etc.). Some points have been passed (oral traditions recount many previous collapses and cultural paradigm shifts), some narrowly averted or forestalled, and others are approaching at an accelerating rate. So, if not the pursuit of an absolute standard, or the probability of reaching it, then where does the urgency to act come from? It does not depend on historical patterns or the assurance of future success. We know that these neither have nor ever will meet any standards of justice we could apply. The need to act only depends on where we are right now and what we can do through our relationships. It's a sentiment Wendell Berry expressed in an interview with Bill Moyers, “We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?” Zhuangzi would almost certainly agree; he knew very well that notions of success, and especially perfection, that are wedded to a single perspective can be a deadly trap.

Hokusai embodies "panta rhei" in The Great Wave

No matter how efficacious the structures of governance are, we have always been dealing with proportions, not a black and white, either/or situation. Perfection was never attainable even under the best conditions, least of all those we find ourselves in today. And it was never the goal to begin with. The goal is to understand and guide the direction of the mix to the best of our ability, prepare for and adapt to those impacts we can anticipate, and pursue as much action (mitigation) as we can. If that action includes overcoming the sources of resistance within government, thereby making it that much less inert, then the proportions of the mix may change accordingly. Nothing is a foregone conclusion. Success and failure are entirely relative to where one stands, not some absolute reference point. "The nemesis will come to you if you insist on having a black and white, either/or way of thinking," McGilchrist warned. For if we insist, what will we do when we discover everything is actually shades of grey? This is why perfectionism and nihilism are opposite sides of the same coin, and that coin is decontextualized absolutism. Whenever we get close to one of those sides, the other is not far off. It is also why the pursuit of what the "blind left hemisphere" (McGilchrist) thinks is “perfect“ ends up creating so much damage to ourselves and each other. That sort of nihilistic pessimism is never far away in contemporary Western culture. It is far better to think in terms of proportions and continua, where we can still love the world, and each other, and find joy. The world isn’t perfect, but we can still try to make it better anyway, and that’s not a Sisyphean pursuit. The West became transfixed by Plato's perfect Forms, while in Eastern aesthetics the highest forms of beauty are "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete." Our pursuit of harmony with the planet will always be an imperfect relationship. "Platonic synchrony" is not sustainable, but "wabisabi synchrony" might be sustainable. As Peter Sterling wrote in "Principles of Allostasis", the goal is not constancy, but coordinated variation.

For properly functioning brains, fear is a powerful motivator to action. But not always. It is true that many people will deny the evidence of their eyes on account of their unwillingness to acknowledge the gravity of a situation and the fear of losing control. It may be that the entire nation is ignoring, or at the least minimizing, the evidence of climate change simply to preserve the illusion of control and reduce our collective fear of the implications. (Just as a person with concerning health symptoms may refuse to see the doctor out of fear of the diagnosis.) And it's not uncommon in those situations to turn attention to something more pleasant for distraction. But what concerns me more than fear is blindness born of disordered thinking and the inability to understand basic relationships, context, depth, and global modes of apprehension. This fragments one's perception of time. Events are seen in isolation, disconnected and do not reveal the pattern of accelerating impacts of which they are a part. The result? We see more requests for aid to address extreme weather events after they occur, but fewer requests to address climate change to prevent them in the first place. And this mode of thinking infects all of us, because we live in a social environment that serves to reinforce it. We are going to need a paradigm shift from atomism to relationalism if we are going to stop ignoring the evidence before us, out of fear or blindness, and respond appropriately to the global situation. We must transpose what many consider merely the decorative "filigree" for the very "fabric" of reality it truly is. If we understand how systems operate, then we can have both rational fear concerning the potential for greater instability and impacts, and be hopeful regarding the potential to mobilize to mitigate them. But if we do not have a relational understanding, we will live in a blissful state of blind ignorance punctuated by ever more frequent and disturbing moments of sheer terror, without any hope nor ability to create a better tomorrow. 

If people had lived during the Eocene, how would they have responded to abrupt climate change? Our tree shrew ancestors were around then. But of course we aren't tree shrews anymore, so during our second trip we'll probably be doing things differently. If AGW has taught us anything, it is the remarkable realization that Earth is fragile and anthropogenic processes are capable of shifting the entire climate system into a new phase. What this means is that the "resist-accept-direct" framework doesn't just apply to regional ecosystems, but to the entire planet. Here's an imperfect analogy between the RAD framework and our available options. There are three possible responses an organism can have to disruption. 1) It can change its environment by mitigating/ resisting environmental changes. 2) It can do nothing, and die, go extinct; effectively accepting fate. 3) It can change itself by adapting, evolving, and otherwise direct/ guide the way it chooses to relate to a changed environment. It's important to note that the first and third of these options are complementary; the organism-environment system is 'coupled' so changes to one side invariably involve the other. Obviously, tree shrews couldn't mitigate the environmental changes that occurred during the Eocene, or put up any effective resistance, they just had the second two options (and thankfully chose the third!). And while there are historical analogues to climate change, there's really no suitable analogue for us. We are writing that story now. So it remains to be seen to what extent humans will use the options that are available to them. Like our early ancestors, we can certainly try to adapt to a much hotter world, a second Eocene. But the first option, the one that wasn't available during the Eocene, is the most radical response of all. It is the inflection point where we go past merely flattening the Keeling Curve (net zero) and begin to turn it downward (net negative). We are at the beginning of this "second Eocene". Can our global response to disruption begin with adaptation, but turning a new page in the history of the planet, end with resistance? 

Climate change mitigation consists of actions to limit global warming and its related effects. Climate change adaptation is the process of adjusting to current or expected climate change and its effects. Many climate actions address both mitigation and adaptation (see a Venn diagram), and we do need to do both. But without mitigation, adaptation alone cannot avert the risk of "severe, widespread and irreversible" impacts. While we know some of these are already occuring, it is important to remember that impacts exist along an open-ended continuum. At the extreme end of this lies runaway climate change. Adaptation alone cannot foreclose that possiblility. These days there has been a proliferation of groups that pursue "deep adaptation", while comparatively fewer on "deep mitigation". This shouldn't be surprising given our hyper-individualistic culture, as Iain McGilchrist points out. Consider the Gaia hypothesis of Margulis and Lovelock. They proposed that both living and inorganic components of Earth synergistically regulate and maintain a number of variables within the narrow limits necessary for life on the planet. So for example, if it got too cold, they would respond in a way that increased global temperatures, or if too hot, they would respond to cool it down. Gaia operates using negative feedbacks, actively mitigating disruption. And perhaps that may be a better way to explain this. We need to focus on actions that produce negative feedback, so that we can mitigate the disruption ocurring to the climate system. Planetary problems call for planetary thinking, and we are now a major part of Gaia's immune system. We'd be well advised to adopt her perspective on the problem, and solve it in the way she's done before. Focusing on mitigation means understanding there are levels of "intervening in a system", and that there is an "order of effectiveness" when doing this. Taking action at a more effective level might save more lives than when intervening at a lower level. This is what Donella Meadows was talking about in her leverage points paper.

For those of us (writers, poets, artists, etc.) who want to create a positive, realistic story for the future, if our stories are grounded principally in trying to strike the desired emotional valence, they may tend toward irrelevance and bounce us between the heights of fantasy and the depths of nihilism. ("Bloomers and doomers" resolve their anxiety about the future by adopting some abstractly decontextualized positive or negative outlook and focus more or less on only the organism or only the environment.) Erica Eller asked “Which do you think sums up our situation most: anthropocene, pyrocene, or...?” To which Stephen Pyne, who coined the neologism "pyrocene", replied “They all have their value - a collective pantheon. We shouldn't reduce it all to one jealous Word that will have no others before it.” (For a list of these see Table A1. “-cenes”, which lists no less than 91 of them, and is certainly not comprehensive). Each offers a different mythos and central organizing principle for structuring a particular worldview. Pyrocene, a worldview centered on the Promethean technology of combustion, certainty lends gravitas to Ken Caldeira’s statement: "For us to even have a chance of addressing the climate problem, it will need to be simply unacceptable to build things with smokestacks or tailpipes that dump waste into the air. This change could happen." But Pyne is right, no single organizing principle, no jealous Word, can completely capture this epoch or describe an ideal mindset. In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche famously wrote "the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing be." And this is exactly what is happening today, a collective exploration of what it means to be alive in this moment. Instead of an epoch, we must ground our visions of change in a proper understanding of relational dynamics. Recall what David Roberts wrote, "Our only choice is the proportions of the mix: action vs. impacts. The less action we and other countries take to address the threat, the more impacts we will all suffer." That follows from an understanding of the dynamics of coupled organism-environment systems on a global scale. The future is radically context dependent. Not only Roberts' "action vs. impacts" reflects this, but also Donella Meadows' "places to intervene in a system". In addition to asking "What are the relations to be improved?", and "How are they improved?", Meadows' encourages us to ask "For whom, or what mindset, are they improved?" The very act of asking this question allows us to step outside our limited, parochial perspectives and see things new. Then change becomes possible. 

As Feng Youlan wrote "Things are ever subject to change, and have many aspects. Therefore many views can be held about the same thing.” Chwałczyk's paper, "Around the Anthropocene in Eighty Names" confirms this: "There are now at least 80–90 proposed alternatives to the term Anthropocene.” Each of these alternative names is intended to incite a cognitive leap in regard to achieving a new perspective on the relationships among subjects and objects in a variety of situations. This is the first step. The second step is producing a meta-analysis or metanarrative of this perspectival profusion, such as that initiated by Chwałczyk, to turn the process back on itself. Now we get a 'perspective on perspectives'. Whereas the first step may seek to align us with an objective understanding of environmental conditions, the second step addresses the interrelationships among the perspectives and 'perspective takers'. This is a frequent source of social and political conflict. The desire to deny and suppress perspectival diversity and assert dominance rather than understand it may be a bigger obstacle for addressing environmental disruption than understanding the physical basis of climate change. Donella Meadows' leverage points paper prompts us to ask just that question about effective interventions: Which is a bigger obstacle to addressing environmental disruption? A failure to grok climate change, or gridlock generated by mutually incomprehensible views? Both are significant. Let's assume a much greater proportion of the public groks climate change. Still, they may not act due to disagreement regarding solutions to address it. (A reality all too familiar today.) But if a greater proportion of the public groks the interrelationships among their various perspectives, perhaps they can stop squabbling long enough to reduce political polarization and social strife to a tolerable level, learn from each other, and create the conditions for a new renaissance. We often look back to James Hansen's 1988 Congressional testimony as the moment America was given a wake up call on the threat of global warming. It went unheeded. Today we have more evidence of AGW than ever, but political and social dysfunction has only increased. This is our Achilles' heel preventing us from using the tools and knowledge we have today to mount an effective response.

A paleoclimate analogue with similar atmospheric composition is definitely useful for inferring what the state of Earth's climate and ecosystems will look like once they've reached relative equilibrium with the higher GHG levels we currently have. And it might also tell us something about the transition process from one climate state to another. Depending upon the rate at which GHG concentrations increase, this transition will be more or less disruptive. Natural climatic forcing and anthropogenic climate drivers both operate on the same spatial scale of the entire Earth. But the rate of change for these systems (technology, culture, and Earth systems) are not synchronized. Whereas the temporal scale of nature is typically on the order of thousands to millions of years, humans have sped up the rate of change to that of just decades to centuries. This significant decoupling must be accounted for somehow within our models. If not, it reduces their relevance. That’s why so much effort is placed on trying to understand how human societies might react as impacts increase. This is the main topic of the IPCC's shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs, read this explainer). Will the global response be coordinated or unilateral? Will it lead to new synergies or expanding sacrifice zones? What possibilities, like black swan events, are we underestimating? The first question we all want to know the answer to is "How will the planet react to AGW?" And we can provide a fairly good answer to that. The second question is much more uncertain: "How will human societies react to the planet reacting to AGW?" Speculating on some of the SSPs outlined in the recent IPCC report is very interesting. Societies will almost certainly continue to deploy more renewable energy and 'natural geoengineering' strategies to mitigate global warming. But if cultural polarization remains unabated, thus frustrating a sufficiently coordinated and well planned response, the increasing impacts of AGW may eventually exert so much pressure that they override debate, lead to unilateral decision making, and consequently the deployment of more 'brute force geoengineering' methods with unknown local and global consequences. In other words, an uncoordinated global response to AGW hasn't been ruled out, and it may make it much more difficult (or nearly impossible) to anticipate and prepare for local conditions. As we prepare for life on a climate changed planet, we will need to contend with both much hotter temperatures, and potentially much hotter temperaments (figuratively speaking). Thus, answering the "How will humans react at scale?" question, and intervening to steer those processes, might be the highest leverage point that influences everything else. Of course, all this remains to be seen. 

Paleoclimate data is very useful, specifically data for conditions similar to present. An ideal record is of sufficiently high resolution over time. Although the sampling interval (temporal resolution) of data from 55 million years ago is very long, by correlating CO2 and temperature it does give us an idea of the prevailing ecological conditions and helps us to measure Earth's "climate sensitivity". It should also allow us to make a rough correlation between the "rate of disruption" and "rate of extinction". To these we now must add the new variable of projected "socioeconomic sensitivity" - the rate at which socioeconomic pathways (social metabolism) change in response to environmental disruption. We can ask: What is the rate of disruption today? When was it similar in the past? For example, if the PETM played out over millions of years, while AGW is orders of magnitude faster, then will the disruption occurring today be correspondingly more dramatic? What are the implications for rates of extinction and shifts in socioeconomic pathways? On the other hand, if the rate is faster but the duration of change is shorter, will the impact be less certain? All of this underscores the need to understand how climate sensitivity results in different levels of disruption given various changes in climate drivers. More severe disruptions tend to lead to more ecological and social upheaval. Today we now have a variety of socioeconomic factors and intervention strategies to consider. Some of these seek to influence the drivers of climate change by means of introducing negative feedback. As we look at our available options, which leverage points will play a role in determining the shared socioeconomic pathway we eventually take? For decades now, it hasn't been for a lack of knowledge that we haven't taken action on climate change. We've known for years that outcomes run the spectrum from bad to very bad. So instead of continuing to ask "How bad will it get?" (as fascinating as that may be) we need to start asking "Where can we intervene?" The key here is locating the most effective points within the system structure. This means turning our focus to thinkers like Donella Meadows and her "places to intervene in a system", and organizing our efforts around these in a very clear manner.

The transformation of mind needed to guide us into an inherently uncertain future isn't a transformation from a "Holocene mind" to an "Eocene mind". (This of course does have many advantages when it comes to being able to flexibly switch to longer term perspectives with greater spatiotemporal depth.) Rather, it's a transformation of mind from seeing a world of static "things", to seeing a world of dynamic "relationships". The IPCC report gives us very clear reasons why we need to do this. The culture of the Western world has distorted the relationship between people and planet. The IPCC report underscores this by identifying the context of dynamic planetary processes, how these are interrelated with one another, and how our decisions past, present, and future, have shaped and will continue to shape the future of the planet. We must heal these relationships, then the 'world of things' will follow. When we see relations as primary it becomes easier to move from the Holocene to the Eocene, or to any other climatic conditions that may result. In a relational sense, the word "adaptation" requires we understand that adaptation is always in relation to a specific context. That means we must ask "To what are we adapting?" Context, contingency, dependency, and causality are essential considerations. And so we might try to predict the future by gathering evidence and making inferences. This attempt to resolve uncertainty is primarily a "left hemisphere" thought process; it provides us with mental clarity and fortifies our sense of purpose. While the recent report on climate change from the IPCC was ostensibly created to give us as much understanding of possible future pathways as possible, the actual conclusions reveal a future that is far less certain than most people would like. 

In answer to the question "To what are we adapting?", rather than selecting an Eocene-like future or a future of dramatic GHG reductions, the relational mind understands that what and how we will adapt fundamentally depends on our evolving relationships to each other and the planet, on choices that haven't been made and actions not yet taken. The IPCC report describes multiple pathways, each of which depend upon the amount of action we do or do not take to mitigate climate change. These depend on our ability to transform society in response to a transforming world, a world that is reciprocally responding to our transformations in a circularly causal manner. Instead of giving us a single trajectory toward the Eocene, we see many different scenarios. In some of these GHG emissions peak then decline, others model a continuing rise in emissions. Each has different impacts on Earth systems and processes. It's relational through and through. The precautionary principle can shed light on how we respond to this dynamic situation. It says that if some course of action, such as rising GHG emissions, whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown, carries even a remote chance of irreparable damage to the ecology, then it should be resisted. This is also what the authors of the IPCC report are telling us. And the best way to resist our current course of action begins with transforming our minds, to see how the relational processes we are a part of are in fact always changing and evolving, and giving rise to multiple highly contingent pathways into an undetermined future.

Our understanding of culture shows that there’s a relationship between our minds and our actions. As A.N. Whitehead said, “As we think, we live.” When and how is the transformation to a relational mindset made? It can either be made by choice or when it becomes impossible to ignore any longer. The people living on the frontlines of climate change cannot ignore it. They see very clearly the relationship between the environment around them and their survival. They know their lives are contingent upon the choices we make and actions we take today. As for the rest of us… there is an old combat adage that states, “War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” For many people living in wealthy Western nations this describes their experience of climate change. They carry on with comfortable lives, distracted by one-sided perspectives on the world, until the moment a forest fire, drought, hurricane, or other extreme event disrupts their comfort and reminds them that they live in a world of relationships, and that they deny these at their own peril. The irony of AGW is that, although on a geologic timescale we are indeed being catapulted into an uncertain future, for a significant number of people this is experienced all too slowly to consciously register. Also ironically, during those moments of AGW induced sheer terror it is of course preposterous to imagine that anyone would indulge in a moment of calm self reflection to reconsider their relationships and perspective on life. By then it is simply too late. So what is to be done? To the extent that any of us are blessed with the ability to rest, reflect, and plan for the future, we must take that opportunity to reconsider our relationships in light of the precautionary principle, make climate justice a priority, and transform them accordingly. 

According to Paul Hawken, "The true cause of global warming is disconnections in all systems. We are disconnected from each other; we are disconnected from nature... Regeneration is about reconnecting those broken strands. You heal a system, whether it is an ecosystem, social system or an immune system, by (re)connecting more of it to itself." That promotes system integrity, and it's one of the many reasons why Hawken believes that, in order to see and understand these relationships, "the human heart, mind, and imagination" are the most essential tools we have. For those who are familiar with the psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist, this is a recognizably "right hemisphere" approach to addressing climate change, and it provides the crucial underlying vision and philosophy for developing a plan. Hawken has done just that. The two goals he had for his book Drawdown were "to map, measure and model the most substantive solutions and to determine if drawdown was possible" and then "bring the carbon that is increasing atmospheric warming back home from whence it came." His new book Regeneration is "a what- and how-to-do-it-book and website" that advances these goals further, by identifying and leveraging important connections between the social and climate justice movements. 

Bamiyan Buddha (Steve McCurry 1992)

Jem Bendell's anti-perspectivism 

The term "adaptation" means "adjusting to current or expected climate change and its effects". It requires us to ask "for who?" or "for what?" is the adjustment made. So in the context of a global market economy, "climate change adaptation" often means making the adjustments necessary to keep the extractive economy (and the wealthy class it benefits) going for as long as possible. "Mitigation" means "actions to limit global warming and its related effects". Again, for whom or what is mitigation done? Crucially, even if mitigation were only done for an extractive economy, it would still have benefits for others, even for indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, and this is because the effects of mitigation are distributed more or less equally. Adaptation can very easily be local and particular. This is what David Roberts was talking about when he said adaptation and mitigation are not morally equivalent, it has to do with the relative difference in the scale of action. Mitigation is global, planetary. Adaptation can be as small and local as one wants it to be.

Jem Bendell didn't have anything to say about these distinctions, as it seems that he was more interested in resolving the existential anxiety he and others felt concerning the future by means of a faulty argument. His paper "Deep Adaptation" (2020 revision to his 2018 paper) states: "For many years, discussions and initiatives on adaptation to climate change were seen by environmental activists and policymakers as unhelpful to the necessary focus on carbon emissions reductions. That view finally changed in 2010... the mainstream climate policy community now recognises the need to work much more on adaptation." But this was not enough, it was still "nearly all focused on physical adaptation" and not on producing the psychological and cultural shift in perspective he thought was necessary. He was right about this. The humanities and social sciences still have much to teach us about our interactions with the global community of life. But rather than a better understanding of psychology, he had one particular perspective in mind. What he saw necessary was a need to overcome our "implicate denial" of "inevitabile near-term social collapse" (and presumably human extinction). For Bendell, this necessarily framed adaptation as being opposed to the utter hopelessness of mitigation efforts. And whether recognized or not, this sort of framing has become implicitly accepted for many. It resonates very well with the Western black-and-white view of the world. You may recall the recent "Planet of the Humans" film by Jeff Gibbs, which was similarly reflected a dismal view of mitigation, and was quickly taken to task for its omissions in numerous reviews. These are all recent tangents of a long, ongoing dialogue between advocates of differing future pathways (see also degrowth, ecomodernism, etc.).

Now adaptation is a culturally loaded term. But if we set aside the overt "doomer" framing it has taken on, it still does have a standard, usefully limited definition as used within the scientific community. We can recall that the IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I, dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II, dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III, dealing with the mitigation of climate change. The recently released IPCC AR6 Working Group 1 SPM states: "If global net-negative CO2 emissions were to be achieved and be sustained, the global CO2-induced surface temperature increase would be gradually reversed..." Mitigation may not be utterly hopeless under all scenarios. This is a point Michael Mann has been trying to get across recently as well, in part to overcome the tendency people have to fall into either the illusion of human invincibility or (more recently) that of human extinction. In our polarized culture, little room is allowed for doubt and nuance, for the reciprocal interaction of multiple perspectives, and the consequence is that the uncertainty of the future and the possibility of change is often unrecognized and underappreciated. So why might Bendell, or anyone else, want to eliminate uncertainty? There are definitely some psychological advantages to doing so. If we can prematurely foreclose a pathway for mitigation then we are released from the anxiety of uncertainty, and free to fully commit ourselves to the only remaining perspective on the future. Anxiety is a major theme within existential psychotherapy, and it is unsurprisingly increasing today. Bendell, as existential therapist, is giving us permission to stop fighting climate change, start accepting "inevitability", and this gives us a clear focus and purpose. Although he uses the language of social change and personal transformation, it is in the service of this single, inevitable, and unscientific point of view he promotes. 

There have always been dogmatic pronouncements regarding the future. The activist community has been done a grave disservice with the advocacy of relinquishment to a narrow perspective on climate change. This group is particularly vulnerable due to preexisting high levels of existential anxiety. As has been mentioned before, mitigation and adaptation can be viewed on a continuum, or represented with a Venn diagram, with various actions forming numerous points of overlap in the middle. Preventing causes of climate disruption, and responding to the effects of disruption, are not always distinct processes. "Deep adaptation" is not so much a scientifically supported course of action so much as a psychologically motivated response to existential anxiety, and an unhealthy one that operates by claiming absolute certainty (or close to it), and ignoring important context and the counter-evidence provided by reputable sources. But these dynamics are not new, nor will they cease from occurring in the future. While we can learn a great deal from paleoclimatic evidence, we also know that the future will not be a repeat of the past due to substantial contextual differences, and that a realistic assessment will allow room for uncertainty and divergent pathways. For this reason it is important to contrast Bendell with the views of those like Mann and the IPCC, who acknowledge more than one perspective on an open future, while being aware of the current dangerous trend. We must identify the faulty reasoning that contributes to a closed future and a subsequent narrowing of our scope of action from the planet (Gaia), where globally coordinated adaptation and mitigation are functionally identical processes, to that of isolated nations, communities, or individuals, where adaptation is often conceived as a local phenomenon in response to the impacts of a climate system whose trajectory is largely outside our scope of action. Action must be on all levels, acknowledge all possible pathways, and advocate for those that accord with a multi-perspectival view of climate justice. At the same time we must work to identify and distance ourselves from those regions in the "adjacent possible" that could lead to greater harm. It's a tough job, and activists should be very cautious regarding any person or organization that would try to undermine it. There are better ways to relieve existential anxiety. Returning to David Roberts, he ended his article stating: "In short, mitigation is fighting for attention and dollars against much mightier foes like Indifference and Narrow Self-Interest. It needs all the help it can get." In a world feeling increasing existential anxiety, self-interest motivated by fear is rising, this serves to constrict our circle of empathy, reduce the scale of action at which we think and operate. Ultimately it narrows our perspectives, making it much more difficult to transform our society and confront the economic system that brought us to this point.  

If we look at the social media presence of Deep Adaptation, their Facebook group has a pinned link to the "DA rules and guidelines". These clearly state "We discourage posts about “mitigation” – such as cutting carbon emissions or the drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere – as our focus is on adaptation." No matter what our opinions may be about this distinction, and whether drawing such lines should steer the course of discussion, their group leaders and moderators have already taken their cue from Bendell. That doesn't invalidate some of the very useful information and collaboration efforts that gets shared and engaged in by most of the well intentioned, very intelligent people who frequent these groups. And I would say the same thing about any social organization that serves multiple community needs. (Religious organizations, for example, may promote many false ideas while still serving important community functions.) The climate of the Holocene will not return within the lifetime of anyone around today, and for many regions there may be no feasible adaptive response that would permit habitation. This has long been the accepted reality for activists, who are well aware that "perfectionism" is not the name of the game. Such a view was recently put into words by Claudia Tebaldi, a lead author of the sixth Assessment report of the IPCC (in Working Group 1). As she said, “Things are going to change for the worse. But they can change less for the worse than they would have, if we are able to limit our footprint now. Every little bit counts.” Paleoclimates are extremely useful metaphors (we must make use of these!), benchmarks to compare our current changes with, and have enormous rhetorical advantages for persuading action on mitigation and adaptation. Nonetheless, we need to maintain awareness of the cultural context in which we live today, specifically the tendency to narrow perspectival scope and reduce contextual depth in response to anxiety. This subtle influence still goes largely unrecognized. 

A 'new language' can help to provide additional ideas, and there are certainly some concepts, such as 'ghehds' as described by Glenn Albrecht, for which words do not exist or are not yet widely known. But if we want to transcend distinctions and resolve specific relationships among concepts that remain obscure, what is needed is the ability to think more in terms of the conceptual structuring of ideas, using integrative levels, spatiotemporal depth, prioritization, continua, and network visualization (Venn diagrams, to cite an earlier example). That way, rather than seeing a loose collection of ideas, we view how our existing ideas, such as adaptation and mitigation, are related to each other and build upon one another. We can then see them more easily in their proper context, provide the missing perspective, and identify where there may be a need for new concepts and words to fill gaps. Recall that Donella Meadows was talking about just these processes when she referred to levels of "intervening in a system" and an "order of effectiveness" in her leverage points paper. This is obviously important. Taking action at a more effective level, with a greater scope of action, might save more lives than when intervening at a lower and narrower level. Such tools are indispensable for assessing our available choices for action. Novelty in language has its advantages, but it can also be a stumbling block for reaching broad audiences and lead to confusion. It's here where the advantages of structuring ideas may be most clear. It allows us to get more mileage out of our existing 'plain language' without the need for adding neologisms, technical jargon, reappropriated terms, etc. unless absolutely necessary.

Thomas Kuhn's perspectivism

Recently Tamler Summers and David Pizarro discussed Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on their podcast Very Bad Wizards. Tamler appeared to have a better understanding of the conceptual foundations of perspectival realism than his co-host David, who was operating much more within the nominalist paradigm. As a result they were unable to reach a common understanding and hilariously recapitulated some of the same debates prompted by the original publication of Kuhn's book! The role that the observer plays in the selection, interpretation, and utilization of scientific theories is of central importance to Kuhn. In fact, without a very clear understanding of exactly what constitutes the dynamic role of the observer (whether this is conceived of in the usual anthropomorphic sense, replete with values etc, or as a more basic relation) it is impossible to understand him.

But I'm getting too far ahead, so let's take a step back. Thomas Kuhn argued for a 'third position' that, at the time, few people could see or appreciate. That position elided the simple categories of relativism and absolutism that Kuhn's admirers and critics were initially tempted to use when interpreting his work. That dichotomy (relativism and absolutism) is roughly synonymous to realism and nominalism, respectively. And as Cornelis de Waal wrote: "Whereas the nominalist claims that only individuals are real, the realist holds that relations are as real as the individual objects they relate." Kuhn developed the realist argument in the direction of perspectivism, and specifically the "perspectival realism" of Ronald Giere (as Giere himself argued, and Michela Massimi more recently). Kuhn's thesis has withstood the intervening decades well. There is "revolutionary science" occurring today, for examples I'd point to McGilchrist's study of brain lateralization (The Master and his Emissary), Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics (Helgoland), Hoffmeyer's biosemiotics (Signs of Meaning in the Universe), and Friston's active inference framework based on the free energy principle (which has been described as "a nuanced form of realism"). Those who criticize these bodies of work from a nominalist paradigm inevitably find them largely unintelligible, and their arrows fail to reach their target, but from a perspectivist paradigm they often can be seen to provide a more coherent explanation of evidence, accounting for apparent anomalies under the dominant nominalist paradigm. This isn't to say that such work is without errors, but that those errors are rarely exposed and addressed without understanding the relevant paradigm within which the work is situated. 

Kuhn famously argued that the accumulation of a sufficient number of anomalies can trigger a crisis leading to a paradigm shift. This is what appears to be occurring today - a shift back to a form of perspectival science that better accounts for the role of observers. Here it is worth noting that, for a variety of reasons, within the majority of non-Western cultures perspectivism is regarded with less antagonism (see Viveiros de Castro and Eduardo Kohn). Such a renaissance will inevitably be more nuanced than previous iterations of perspectivism by virtue of integrating (and in some cases reinterpreting) the prior advancements of nominalist Western science. This process of integration is accounted for within Kuhn's concept of "progress through revolutions". And accordingly, since nominalism reached its apogee in American colonialism, it is here that the contrast will be felt most acutely, the transition will be most disrupting, and the misconceptions will be most profuse. From a nominalist perspective, it is highly improbable that the phases of change leading to a realist paradigm can be accurately predicted, and this applies to any discipline, and yet those who cannot fully release their grasp on the previous paradigm are today trying to anticipate what the world will look like under the next. The false prophets of our age are hopelessly confused. "The one thing I think you shouldn't say is that now we've found out what the world is really like," Kuhn said in one of his last interviews, "because that's not what I think the game is about." This firmly coincides with the Zhuangzian position, which in the words of Chad Hansen suggests "there is no final or ultimately broad perspective from which we can make judgments. All we can substitute for this global perspective is some local consensus. There may be occasions when we experience a gestalt broadening of perspective as revealing something real and significant (like waking from a dream), but we cannot extrapolate from that to claim to know the direction or final result of such gestalt leaps to broader perspectives, or a final state of knowing what to do." Strikingly, this is recognizably Kuhnian, almost verbatim, concerning the operation and ultimate aims of science. It is interesting to note that how these thinkers are interpreted, and whether they are held in low or high regard, depends on the characteristics of the currently ascendant paradigm. The rise of perspectivism, as we near the second quarter of the 21st century, is finally showing signs of eclipsing the nominalism of the 20th century, and the genius of Zhuangzi (and Kuhn) is finding wider appreciation in the West. 

Thomas Kuhn's insights have informed many. In an interview with Steve Paulson, Stuart Kauffman said "The current scientific paradigm has done extraordinarily good work for at least 350 years. The reigning paradigm of reductionism goes back to the Greeks in the 1st century A.D., and then explodes with Newton and the idea of a deterministic universe. But reductionism breaks down once we try to explain biology and culture. The new view is that evolution of the universe is partially lawless and ceaselessly creative. We are the children of that creativity. This new scientific worldview brings with it a sense of membership with all of life and a responsibility for the planet that's largely missing in our secular world. If we can't transform our secular humanist, consumerist worldview into one in which we have this sense of responsibility, awe and wonder for the planet and all life, then we can't invent a global ethic. Yet we need it to create a transnational, mythic structure to sustain the global civilization that's emerging." A paradigm shift (or cognitive shift etc.) has different meanings for different people. It’s important because, as Brook Ziporyn wrote, "People are always trying to use some one-sided technique to master the world, to know it, identify it, and commodify it." Iain McGilchrist has been vocally warning of this tendency as well. But the shift we need to make isn't necessarily from one perspective to another (useful as that can be), but fundamentally we need a shift to understand how all one-sided perspectives, in and of themselves, operate to shape our world. Restoring the world will also involve restoring our ability to work with and understand the diversity of perspectives we share the planet with. Tellingly, understanding the influence of “perspectival delimitation” has not been a hallmark of contemporary society. But perspectives are not only delimited by their capacity for conceptual depth in this Kuhnian sense, they are also limited simply due to innate physical restrictions of access to information. Because perspective is positional (limited), it may be said that the "respect" a person receives is correlated directly to their position relative to a viewer.  Making this connection between the more conceptual, philosophical aspect of perspectivism with the relatively more material and semiotically embodied considerations is necessary for many applications.

Liberation and Bondage: Love and the strife of opposites

Social navigation requires 'theory of mind' and a capacity to empathize with other perspectives. But people have difficulty understanding one another for a far more basic reason. It is in consequence of the fact that our attention to contextual information is limited by the scope of our perspective on our shared causal history (Smolin's CTV). And as a result, interpersonal evaluations are unavoidably made from a highly attenuated point of view. We have very little access to information about other people: no knowledge of interior mental states (other than what is disclosed), limited knowledge of physical processes and actions (in regard to social roles and responsibilities), and only partial knowledge of material conditions (through our sensory access to appearance). On some level, each of us is aware of this, and one of the most essential tasks we learn growing up is how to cultivate and curate this information and make it selectively available to important members within our social groups. Otherwise, by default, they are unlikely to access it, or misinterpret it if they do. To the extent that ethical action involves the transformation of perspectives, how this perspectival delimitation is understood and engaged with is essential to that process. This necessarily involves interaction, negotiation, compromise, etc. - activities which occur between many interdependent individuals. Heraclitus called processes like these, that frequently involve opposition, ἔρις (eris), "strife". To him, all things (synergies) come into being through the generative processes of strife. This might sound familiar, as the Buddha’s first noble truth is that life is suffering. About Heraclitus’ belief, John Burnet wrote “the strife of opposites is really an attunement (armonia). For that which is made up of both the opposites is one, and only when the one is divided are the opposites disclosed. ["Hen diapheron heautôi."] From this it follows that wisdom is not a knowledge of many things, but the perception of the underlying unity of the warring opposites.” (And relatedly, in Plato's Symposium, the desire and pursuit of the whole, of original unity, is called eros or love.) If Heraclitus is right about strife and harmony, then understanding one another involves first recognizing the limitations of our perspectives, and second, assisting each other through a frequently difficult (sometimes even painful) process of attunement. This is supported by 'Deep Social Mind' theory, which describes how we are adapted to read the minds of trusted others while at the same time assisting those others in reading our own minds. Our minds mutually interpenetrate. 'Mind' in the human sense is not locked inside this or that skull but instead is relational, stretching between us. Effective communication hinges upon our ability to establish a relational connection that we hold in common. Building upon this common ground together can then take us in new directions. If two or more people accept the same words and definitions, that can suffice as a beginning. But it's not always necessary. There are other relationships that can be used in place of words, like a shared experience, or a mutual interest. Inter-species cooperation happens this way. Whales and people, for example, have at times shared a mutual interest in the same food source and hunted together to increase each other's success. Relationships are always going to have a perspectival element, and so we can't insist on achieving a perfectly objective understanding for anything. Even our scientific terminology runs into these complications. But when we can see our relationship to each other, that's when communication begins.

Much of the discussion of perspectivism within this article highlights its liberating aspects, which may help explain why it appealed to figures like Rovelli, Bogdanov, Nagarjuna, and Nietzsche. These thinkers were all, each in their own way, concerned with emancipation from various constrictions (of one form or another) at some point in their lives. But if opposites are indeed complimentary, as Heraclitus, Jung, and Laozi asserted, then after this liberation we must also be able to account for our bondage. The syzygy of freedom and constraint stand in a "recursive and generative dialectic". Freedom requires restraint, and the dynamic between them gives rise to ethics, norms, social roles, teleological purpose, Kantian categorical imperatives, motivational drives, and so on and so forth. Nietzsche famously wrote “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Pure liberation doesn't supply us with the 'why's' of life, rather it is the constraints, the 'strife' of Heraclitus, that supplies much of that. But we don't have to look far. We are naturally constrained, both materially and epistemically, by our limited perspectives. In consequence of this our main disadvantage in life is a routine failure to understand, empathize, and truly appreciate the value of others - whether these 'others' are people, animals, conditions, or anything at all. And so each night before drifting to sleep we must prepare for the coming day with one single thought on our mind: How can I better understand the partial truths and values in another's perspective? Effective communication hinges upon our ability for perspective-taking, for establishing a perspectival connection or 'meeting of the minds', perhaps not unlike that of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, who according to Feng Youlan eventually "stopped talking and silently understood each other with a smile". This is the highest level of perspectival communion (or oneness), and it seems more elusive these days.

What should we do? We can begin with the advice from Lisa Feldman Barrett for how to 'cultivate' an emotion or conceptual construction for aiding in the adoption of the perspective of others. To what end? To the explicitly normative end that they, in turn, will also be enabled to reciprocally reflect our perspective, and more broadly, those of others in general. Paul Condon described one way of cultivating perspectival awareness, and join others in relations rather than identify with our reactions, thereby building a retinue of connectivity. Simple moments of caring connection from our life become imprinted in the body, and we can be reconnected to those by imagining them again. Simulated experiences produce patterns similar to when they happened in the past. So if we had a felt connection with a person or place, we can establish that awareness in this way. Condon notes: “In Mahayana scriptures, buddhas and bodhisattvas gaze into the meditator’s enlightened potential and into the destructive thoughts and reactions that obscure it. In Vajrayana traditions, a teacher’s job is to see into and resonate with students’ enlightened potential, empowering them to transcend their reductive impressions of themselves and others by joining in the deeper seeing by which they are seen.” These powerful figures serve as models for how we are to relate to each other. Recall that something is real only insofar as it participates in relations with others (per Imre Hamar), and indeed, the moral of the story of Kisa Gotami is that an isolated human being cannot function (per Roger Ames). So relationships, and bonds of devotion in particular, should never be a 'one way street'. This is perspectival interfusion, the merging of causal histories in the language of Smolin's CTV, and it results in mutual transformation. We must strive to fully appreciate the perspectives of those whose well being we value most. And it is the highest level of devotion, the summum bonum, to always seek to benefit of the perspective of the beloved. Their benefit is indistinguishable from our benefit. We take each other hand in hand and look to the future together. By it's very nature, this is far more an art than a science. 

Now having described what we ought to strive for, an understanding of perspectival constraints also informs us that, paradoxically, one of the primary ways we benefit their perspective is by not controlling or holding onto conditions too firmly. We cannot exercise perfect control in choosing the qualities of the people we love. There are many things we do not and cannot know, and so our choices will never be made with perfect knowledge of the relevant facts. But although most of those are outside of our control, we do decide how we will respond to them once they become apparent. We must allow room for change and growth so that our relationships can adapt to shifting conditions, and so that we too can be personally transformed through that bond. Sometimes you may need to just take the plunge and jump in with both feet. Letting go of aspects of the past, and not holding on too tightly, to make room for new ways of living requires a lot of trust, dedication, and the recognition that 'everything flows', in the words of Heraclitus. We should never treat relationships as if they were a 'thing'; they are living and ever-changing processes. This was the advice of Linji, who, in one of the most famous and characteristically shocking aphorisms of Zen Buddhism, said: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him". Less starkly, the "Treatise on the Correct View" made the same point: "The great sage preached the law of emptiness in order to free men from all personal views. If one still holds the view that emptiness exists, such a person the buddhas will not transform." Don't become overly attached to any single thing, view, or ego; these are all partial, fragmentary, and in isolation can only ever provide fleeting satisfaction. However interaction, the flow of consciousness, the dance of relations, and the possibility of adaptive change and growth is more promising. "Finis vitae sed non amoris" is not far from the truth - we hold ourselves most lightly when our relationships are felt most deeply. Extreme devotion to benefiting the perspective of the beloved reaches its zenith in states of self transcendence such as religious ecstasy, which corresponds to an exclusively right hemisphere view of the world (per Iain McGilchrist). Without the discrimination of the left hemisphere to counterbalance, this can lead to harmful neglect. So there must be a balance between the two views, an ability to simultaneously transcend but also to attend to our mundane needs. Love transcends our own perspective so that we are able to attend to that of others. ‬ The recognition of this led to the concept of the bodhisattva, where self transcendence and self care coexist together. It's also reflected in the Zen sayings “nirvana is samsara” and “In carrying water and chopping wood: therein lies the wonderful Tao." 

Nietzsche's perspectivism

In his article "What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America", Alexander Star wrote: "In a 1985 book “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” the Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas argued that Nietzsche's perspectivism does not imply that all beliefs are equally valid but that “one’s beliefs are not, and need not be, true for everyone.” On this reading, to fully accept a set of beliefs is to accept the values and way of life that are bound up with it, and since there is no single way of life that is right for everyone, there may be no set of beliefs that is fit for everyone. At its best, American individualism is not about the aggrandizement of the self or the acquiescent assumption that everybody simply has a right to think what they want. Rather, it stresses that our convictions are our own, and should be held as seriously as any other possessions. Or, as Nietzsche imagined philosophers would one day say, “ ‘My judgment is my judgment’: no one else is easily entitled to it." He proposed that everything we know is merely a partial “perspective knowing”. Nietzsche's contemporaries in philosophy were looking for mystical and transcendent truths, but he wondered whether knowledge or facts can exist independently of human conception of them. KJL Kjeldsen writes, "The only way that we can process any information about the world is through our sense organs; this information must then be interpreted through the brain. Truth is not mystical and transcendent, but a concept which we have created for the purposes of understanding the world, and engaging with it. It is something humans seek after because there is a need for it. Nietzsche is arguing that the very notion of a fact as independent of the human mind is nonsensical. Such a thing would be, by definition, both imperceptible and inexpressible." CS Peirce's (fallibilist, pragmatist, synechist) beliefs are substantively similar, and though he chose the label "objective idealism", this rather appears to be a form of epistemological idealism. Nietzsche: "The world has once again become infinite to us: insofar as we cannot reject the possibility that it includes infinite interpretations". (aphorism 374 from The Gay Science) In "The Portable Nietzsche" Walter Kaufmann translates a line from Notebooks (Summer 1886 – Fall 1887) thus: "Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations." (458) Physicists might note the observer effect in physics. In order for anything to be observed at all, it must first be interacted with, which changes the state of that which is observed. In quantum mechanics there are truly only interpretations. 

Both Rovelli and Nietzsche are "perspectivists" in their own ways. We can see how Nietzsche arrived at this conclusion. Rovelli approached it from the field of quantum mechanics, where facts can be different depending on the role of the observer (he refers to "Schrodinger's cat", for example). They both pose what appears to be a similar philosophical situation, and raise issues that have yet to be fully resolved. How do we arbitrate disputes? What role does power, science, religion, and social construction play (and how are these understood)? First a few brief detours. In some places religion served political needs. In life we cannot avoid making some judgments about right and wrong, and this is a stumbling block. In the development of Christianity we can see in many parables that Jesus suggests that understanding context can be more important than blindly applying a set of rules (like Mosaic law) to every situation. Many Christians today have forgotten how important context is and descended into blind dogmatism, exactly the pharisaical perspective Jesus stood in opposition to. Ironically, atheists who understand the importance of context are nearer in spirit to Jesus than Christians who have forgotten it. When we consider the forces undermining cooperative social institutions and undercutting our attempts to construct a more resilient society, it might be a failure, whether from lack of exposure, ability, or out of fear, to understand and integrate alternative perspectives that emerge from different contexts. Truth is not only shaped by processes of social construction, but can be traced back to a deeper understanding of reality (Rovelli's view). While biosemiotics expands the notion of significance as a property of all living things, Rovelli expands the notion of what an "observer" constitutes. So the value of perspectivism here isn't in choosing our own truths or facts (where Nietzsche advocates this I must conditionally disagree), but rather in recognizing that the processes by which we determine "truth" are relevant to the truths themselves. We only have access to our internal perspective and cannot claim perfect objectivity in any situation. [A brief discursion on facts may be in order here... I have a friend who pointed to voting ballots found in the trash and the spike in vote counts, suggesting these constituted proof of widespread election fraud. Trump took this and ran with it. Both events were taken out of context to support the claim that the 2020 election was stolen. But had people understood that the first case was isolated, and the second case was an artifact of the vote counting process, the Big Lie would've had fewer legs to stand on. I also know people who claim the coronavirus is no worse than the flu. And in fact, some people who have contracted it display no symptoms. But when we look at the consequences across the nation, and the strain the pandemic has placed on the health care system, it is a lot worse than the flu. Understanding context is not the strong point for some people, but that's how we form an accurate perspective on isolated facts. Without knowing the context, these isolated facts very easily become the seeds for Big Lies.]

Source: Helgoland (182)

Rovelli devotes half of his attention in Helgoland to Bogdanov, and if anyone is capable of finding a path out of the numerous traps and snares that a relational perspective can set, perhaps Bogdanov can provide some guidance. Beginning with the premise that everything is a relationship, if my relationship to something is different from your relationship to it, then am I right and you are wrong? Of course not. But then how do we arbitrate disputes between us? We can establish other standards by which to function as an organizational whole. This is essentially the process of forming additional, new relationships between us and our mutually shared interests that are capable of contextualizing situations involving such larger system dynamics, this creates a broader perspective in the hierarchical structure of relationships capable of integrating diverse perspectives to enable equitable arbitration. (In Helgoland, Rovelli resolves the issue of quantum entanglement in a similar manner by expanding the scope of the system.) 

In A Home and a Resting Place, Peter Critchley wrote: "The struggle to attain a disinterested viewpoint, to find an Archimedean point which enables us to discern pure rational principles, is a chimera in this understanding, and may even be part of an ideological attempt to assert particular interests under the cover of claims to the universal good. Not only are we never in a position to be able to call something an objective fact, we are well advised to be suspicious of those who dress up their claims in terms of objectivity. Ultimately, all that human beings can do is perceive the world and interpret what comes to their senses. If we want to push the argument to extremes, and provoke a certain outrage, there are as many truths as there are perceivers." He then rightly asks: "But if it is all interpretations, I’m interested to know on what grounds Nietzsche advances his interpretation over others, rather than accept the world as the endless circulation of interpretations, no one of which counts as more valid than another." Nietzsche's statement that "morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena — more precisely, a misinterpretation" implies that intersubjective norms established for the purpose of improving social and environmental conditions are in conflict with our needs. As he wrote "it is our needs that interpret the world; our instincts and their impulses for and against". But haven't cultural anthropologists shown that cultural norms and institutions function to promote general health and well being, and aid in achieving common goals while restraining profligate wastefulness? To wit, haven't our morals emerged precisely from our needs? Another of Critchley’s books, Being at One, also wrestles with the individualism and ethical nihilism of our world (much like Arran Gare did in Nihilism Inc.). He effectively articulates a position not unlike that of the “ethics of care” and the derived notion of “relational ethics”, and like the developmental and evolutionary accounts of ethics provided by Kauffman and Mumford, Rovelli’s RQM, as described in Helgoland, extends these attempts all the way down to the very fabric of reality. Unfortunately, as Rovelli is a physicist and not a rigorous philosopher, elsewhere he has used the adjectives “relational” and “perspectival” interchangeably while describing his ideas. We should note however that within the field of ethics there is a world of difference between Nietzsche’s perspectivism, which focuses on a sort of individual liberation, and an ethics that is rooted in relational capacities such as the ethics of care. Some people may confuse his position, but to be clear, Rovelli has many times acknowledged that we “live and thrive only in relation”, as Critchley put it, to our physical and social environment.

Politics is currently engaged in unwinnable wars around incommensurate values. How do we get out? One possible approach is to contrast the relational and absolutist views, then generate two 'transformations' and two 'acknowledgements' to evaluate which is valid: Acknowledge the absolute is absolute. Transform the absolute to relative. Transform the relative to absolute. Acknowledge the relative is relative. In practice, absolute standards remain elusive. And yet society cannot operate without some minimal set of standards, those we typically call cultural norms, social institutions, and other means for calibrating our divergent viewpoints to achieve common goals. Ethics requires reason, not faith, to transcend parochial perspectives that are capable of causing terminal division and hatred. The physical body is composed of divisible units and yet works toward common purposes (until cancer destroys its innate harmony). It has been often remarked how the body politic functions in much the same way. Nietzsche provides a version of perspectivism that is anti-social, and therefore he can't be turned to for useful recommendations on social policy. His relativities will never find harmony. But perhaps a more culturally and environmentally informed perspectivism, one derived from relational ethics that values synchrony across individuals and groups, would fare better. We've seen attempts by Viveiros de Castro, and possibly Bogdanov, Freinacht, and others. The only valid approach? We cannot begin until we acknowledge the relative is relative. As Jacob Bronowski said, "When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality [context], this is how they behave [genocide, ecocide]. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance... we have to touch people."

"Disenchanting science" has tended to ignore the living relations in favor of the dead matter. There are several proposed ways to avoid the resulting dangers attendant to this nihilism, the danger of solipsism or subjectivity without the possibility of arbitrating conflict (other than the brute contest of power). To create a substantive ontology of the good, we can shift the focus away from subjectivity and towards objectivity (for example, in an overarching authoritative framework). Furthermore, we can ask whether this framework belongs to the category of 'things' (where we find subjects, objects, communities, atoms, essences, etc.) or whether it belongs to the category of relationships and processes (habitus, ethics, transformation, causality, etc., which help us make sense of things). If we place the transcendent in the category of things, it risks becoming treated like little more than the dead matter of a disenchanted science, like just another of its objects. If we place the transcendent in the process-relational category, it is brought within the scope of meaning-making, and can shed that light on our scientific engagements. Arran Gare has noted that 'revolutionary science' has been done in this manner. As for the question of whether a relational ontology of the good is subjective or objective, it could be argued that it is both, in the sense that only through the relationship between subject and object do virtues, and notions such as the good, have meaning. (This complicates how it should be understood when compared to other approaches, such as pragmatism.) The potential for a more lasting foundation for peace may lie precisely in the mediation of subject-object relations.  

In "Perspectivism Narrow and Wide: An Examination of Nietzsche's Limited Perspectivism from a Daoist Lens", Casey Rentmeester wrote: "Rather than a singularity, perspectivism may be better seen as a multiplicity, a dynamic interplay. Whereas the Daoist conception of nature is one of flows of energy that work together to create a harmonious equilibrium, Nietzsche views nature as a battlefield of urges striving to increase their power by overcoming any and all opposing forces, whether they be weak or strong. In other words, whereas Chuang Tzu stresses the interdependence and mutual cooperation of all natural things, Nietzsche stresses the fundamental strife inherent in natural processes that results from each entity working independently to enhance its own power. The radical egalitarianism that Chuang Tzu espouses is intimately intertwined with his espousal of perspectivism, which differs from the Nietzschean perspectivism. Those of us who want to fight for equality for historically oppressed groups such as women may want to turn to Chuang Tzu for a more inclusive form of perspectivism. The fact that Chuang Tzu’s perspectivism denies oppressive frameworks makes his philosophy more fruitful for those of us who want to fight for equality."

Interdisciplinary perspectivist approaches

While Rovelli focuses on "relationalism" and takes Werner Heisenberg as his muse, in Posthumanist Performativity Karen Barad focuses on "agential realism" and Niels Bohr. They both come from a place of broad consilience. As Barad writes: "The “knower” does not stand in a relation of absolute externality to the natural world being investigated — there is no such exterior observational point." This much is clear, but there are important differences between where they place emphasis. For Barad, Bohr illuminates the agency of matter. Barad writes: "For Bohr, apparatuses are particular physical arrangements that give meaning to certain concepts to the exclusion of others; they are the local physical conditions that enable and constrain knowledge practices such as conceptualizing and measuring; they are productive of (and part of) the phenomena produced; they enact a local cut that produces “objects” of particular knowledge practices within the particular phenomena produced. On the basis of his profound insight that “concepts” (which are actual physical arrangements) and “things” do not have determinate boundaries, properties, or meanings apart from their mutual intra-actions, Bohr offers a new epistemological framework that calls into question the dualisms of object/subject, knower/known, nature/culture, and word/world... On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations — relations without preexisting relata. It makes no sense to talk about independently existing things as somehow behind or as the causes of phenomena. In essence, there are no noumena, only phenomena... On an agential realist account, discursive practices are not human-based activities but rather specific material (re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted."

Barad also provides the interesting background history Rovelli largely skips over: "The postulation of individually determinate entities with inherent properties is the hallmark of atomistic metaphysics. Atomism hails from Democritus. According to Democritus the properties of all things derive from the properties of the smallest unit—atoms (the “uncuttable” or “inseparable”). Liberal social theories and scientific theories alike owe much to the idea that the world is composed of individuals with separately attributable properties. An entangled web of scientific, social, ethical, and political practices, and our understanding of them, hinges on the various/differential instantiations of this presupposition. Much hangs in the balance in contesting its seeming inevitability." Our world of hyper-individualism may owe in part to the legacy of Democritus (as well as Parmenides, Zeno, and Plato, per McGilchrist). Barad is in good company with Latour, Haraway, and Bennett here, and the notions of agentic realism are well trod posthumanist ground. Related is Standpoint Theory (or Standpoint epistemology), about which Mila Ghorayeb writes “Theorizing that centers experiential knowledge is not a new feature of contemporary identity politics or of “postmodernism.” Early modern philosophers also spoke of socially situated knowledge. In Discourse on Method, René Descartes argued that diversity of opinion arises from different experiences. As such, those with different experiences will bring us different perspectives about how they experience the world and how we relate to each other.” This has been taken in many directions. Olufemi Taiwo cautions “[The] very strength of standpoint epistemology – its recognition of the importance of perspective – becomes its weakness when combined with deferential practical norms. A constructive approach would focus on the pursuit of specific goals or end results." Rovelli edges still further toward the relativism that Barad and others might shy away from. He is in apparent agreement with descriptions of agentic realism and the implications that follow, however there is a rot at the core of any materialisms, no matter whether these are posthumanist or not. And his reconfiguration of knowledge cuts still deeper. 

Studies of perspectivism have also been introduced into contemporary anthropology, initially through the influence of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and his research into indigenous cultures of South America. Jon Goodbun wrote, "When goals are set by an instrumental conscious purpose based upon a necessarily partial viewpoint, and unmediated by a wider eco-systemic awareness, all kinds of pathologies play out [cf. McGilchrist]. Bateson developed research methods of “double-description” and “metalogues”, arguing that perceiving the patterns which connect living systems – essential for not breaking those relations – requires working with multiple views of the world. This method has been extended in recent years by radical anthropologists such as Eduardo de Viveiros de Castro and Eduardo Kuhn, through various multi-perspectivist approaches." Viveiros de Castro called to make anthropology a practice for “la décolonisation permanente de la pensée”. His name should be familiar to anyone who has read Eduardo Kohn's highly acclaimed book "How Forests Think". Kohn's work builds upon authors such as Latour, Haraway and Viveiros de Castro, and seeks to take the social sciences beyond the limits of strictly human relations. So here we have come full circle once again, making interdisciplinary links between physics and anthropology, between the relationalism of Rovelli and the perspectivism of Viveiros de Castro (we can even link this to politics, as Rovelli does with Bogdanov). In Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism Viveiros de Castro writes: "All beings see the world in the same way. But because affects, dispositions, and capacities render the body of every species unique, what changes is the world that they see." This echoes both Nagarjuna's perspectivism, "The wisdom of awakening bursts forth by itself", and Rovelli's statement that "facts are relative", they are perspectival. One can think of an environment as consisting of multiple perspectives, an 'ecology of observers'. Sympoiesis then describes how the observer-observed dynamic as one of mutual constraint until an attracting (synchronization) manifold is reached. If we want to truly understand the perspective of someone who comes from a different culture and speaks a foreign language, translation alone may not be enough. Translation is a “mapping”. Maps can be very good, but they can also be deceptive if they contain convincing errors. We must agree with Alfred Korzybski that “a map is not the territory”, and recognize that as the complexity of what is translated increases, the fidelity of the map tends to decrease. Eventually one must learn the territory itself, the language and culture, and dispose of all maps, pass through all the filters, until reaching the final barrier which even those who share the same culture and language cannot penetrate, the irreducible features of perspective that language itself was invented to bridge. 

Participatory Universe

In attempting to characterize the unifying qualities of systems with phenomenal experience, Christof Koch said "if it feels like something to be such a system; it has an interior perspective. The complexity and dimensionality might differ vastly, but each one has its own crystal shape." Koch is famous for, among other things, working on the neural correlates of consciousness with Francis Crick and later with Giulio Tononi on "integrated information" theory. In the place of dominant interpretations of quantum mechanics with their reductive approach, Wolfgang Smith proposed the use of Thomistic and Aristotelian concepts, like "potency and act". He believes these better explain how a "corporeal object" and its associated "physical object" constitute a whole of which either aspect may be dealt with depending upon our perspective, but cannot be reduced one to the other. By comparison, Carlo Rovelli, also a critic of many of these same interpretations, suggested that in fact there are no objects per se at all, and that the apparent paradoxes of QM are better understood using a relational ontology as the starting point. Sterling Brown, the actor who played Randall Pearson in the drama series "This is Us", said “Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.” Koch and Brown are two people who generally are not mentioned together, but the metaphor of a translucent crystal, prism, or lens recalls the etymology of the word perspective, which Walter Benesch, in his 1997 book "An Introduction to Comparative Philosophy", said combines the roots 'specere' (to look) with 'per' (through). Thus perspective is 'seeing through'. It has taken me over 20 years, but I feel that I now understand the most difficult chapters of that book. The moment of enlightenment could perhaps be traced back to Rovelli's presentation on 6/2/21 for the annual Mike Jackson Lecture on Systems Thinking, when he noted that relational quantum mechanics (RQM) describes how systems manifest themselves in interactions. He was clear that this is "relational or relative (perspectivism), not subjective. It does not depend on the knowledge of a subject, it is rather about the structure of relational phenomena." (Similarly, Deleuze wrote: "Such is the foundation of perspectivism. It does not express a dependency on a predefined subject; on the contrary, whatever accedes to the point of view will be subject.") Rovelli's fundamental description of relationality opened my mind to seeing things I formerly thought I understood, but in an entirely new light. Conceptual links that seemed tenuous and obscure made more sense. 

This applies to the outline and content of Benesch's magnum opus. He wrote "Consciousness, the elements of our experience, and symbols can be objectified if viewed as independent objects. But this is always accomplished by an observing, thinking subject from a point of view, in an actual situation, whose interpretation is dependent upon a sequence of remembered, possible situations, in which all distinctions made and names applied are a synthesis of the aspects of human experience and the perspectives that observers and their cultures have upon these (200)... Understanding, then, is a combination of aspect and perspective, while failure to understand or to know would entail trying to separate aspect from perspective (31)... Perhaps our very survival depends upon this. Certainly the quality of the mental and spiritual lives we live in philosophical space presupposes it. (201)" Benesch frequently turned to Feng Youlan, who wrote "Things are ever subject to change and have many aspects. Therefore many views can be held about one and the same thing. Once we say this, we assume that a higher standpoint exists. If we accept this assumption, there is no need to make a decision ourselves about what is right and what is wrong. The argument explains itself." (212) In his 2014 article, "The Paradox of Thinking and The Unthinkable", Walter Benesch wrote: "Nature is a continuum. Human beings are that aspect of the nature continuum that is aware and capable of having a perspective upon itself as a changing dynamic process... The 19th and 20th Centuries marked a shift in the physical and social sciences from the axiomatic and materialistic objectivism of the Greek philosophers of the Axial Age toward a dynamic process view of both nature and knowledge. This is a view which is much closer to the views of many traditional Chinese philosophers of the Axial Age. This shift has been accompanied by a realization of the implicit necessity of accommodating the ‘mind of the observer’ as an aspect of the ‘nature of the observed’ in the process of observation within what Wheeler calls a participant/ spectator universe. This not only challenges the absolutist, mechanistic presuppositions of naïve empiricism and classical physical science; it also requires replacing them with a flexible epistemological methodology for accommodating the rapidly changing theories of nature in physical and social science."

Thomas Metzinger developed the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE) from that of “minimal phenomenal selfhood” (MPS), which included a “weak, geometrical first-person perspective”. He asked “is perspectivalness a necessary condition for phenomenality?” He said no, because the definition of perspective he used requires that a self-conscious “epistemic agent model” is alert, oriented, and has executive control in terms of attentional agency. Still, it may be worth asking if it is really possible to ignore the fundamentally perspectival (or relational) nature of experiential content. Metzinger's definitional choice was likely made to meet the qualifications he assumes are necessary for nonduality, which he associates with a “God’s-eye point of view”, however this seems conceptually flawed, given the assertions of numerous philosophers and physicists that this would be a "view from nowhere". Given his chosen criteria, the decision to exclude the observer from phenomenal experience makes sense, but is incompatible with relational physics. This is too high a price to maintain the internal consistency of his arguments, which are then reduced to an inapplicable thought experiment. Metzinger should rather consider the possibility of a nondual and nonabsolute relativist (or multi-perspectivism) approach, beginning with Zhuangzi. Rovelli’s definition of perspective is compatible with this, and in contrast to the definition used by Metzinger, is understood to be simply how “systems manifest themselves in interactions”. This could make it a fundamentally constitutive feature for MPE. Perhaps a reformulation of MPE as “minimal perspectival experience” using Rovelli’s definition of perspective would also be useful for understanding Zhuangzi’s notion of “fasting of the mind” (zuowang, 坐忘) and Dogen’s notion of perspectival delimitation (as described by Bret Davis). These concepts can then expand our understanding of how an empathic relationship with all life (and ourselves) is possible, and further develop Benesch’s aspect/perspective dimension of philosophical space, as it draws upon support from Zhuangzi. Defining the minimal qualities of perspective and contextual depth would allow one to more easily engage in the transformative potential of perspective, whether expanded, contracted, or shifted, that both Zhuangzi encouraged and has since been recommended by many others (see Bach, Barrett, and Vance below). Regardless of whether conceived of as minimal/maximal, shallow/deep, narrow/broad, or focused/diffuse, the 'fasting of the mind' concept is intended to enable appropriate transformations of perspective, perhaps through downgrading weights on our epistemic priors, loosening the grip of habitual patterns of thought when they become maladaptive so that we can more efficiently respond to environmental change and stressors. A. C. Graham notes that such a person is in accordance with "the transforming processes of heaven and earth, and will say the right thing as naturally as a bird sings.” What Metzinger or Friston might refer to as the agent's "generative self model" is intended to harmonize the agent and environment in a single, synchronous relationship through continuous model updating, but this is prone to malfunction. Mind-fasting could therefore be understood as a corrective measure for improving this relational dynamic.

It has been suggested (though it is a simplification) that the only thing that is absolute is relative, or equivalently, only the relative is absolute. This is the Heraclitean dictum: panta rhei, everything changes, and it appears paradoxical to the absolutist Western worldview. Returning to Rovelli's arguments for relational quantum mechanics (RQM), or James Ladyman's description of ontic structural realism (OSR) should be helpful to explain it. Ladyman points out that fundamental physics points toward the conclusion that “at bottom” there are no “things,” only structure. This will sound surprising to many people. The most interesting debates are not about whether there are things or not, but rather how exactly we can best characterize this "thingless" structure. For example, Yuval Noah Harari suggests it might be pure information, the "dataism" he mentioned in his book Homo Deus. Rovelli's interpretation is that reality is relational, not relational in the sense of requiring conscious subjective observers, but rather in the sense of how one electron relates to another electron (or other particle), or more generally, how “systems manifest themselves in interactions”. There's a lot to unpack there, but at essence it involves a paradigm shift from objects to relationships as the defining feature of reality, and that goes for whether you or I are a part of that reality or not - it's thoroughly mind-independent. The hardest part though is just making the paradigm shift. As David Mermin describes it, "correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not", or otherwise stated "relations without relata". But what is particularly interesting is the implications of these theories. Our culture is bound up in our physical worldview. If we are going to understand minds, we will need to understand them by means of a properly formulated physics, and this will in turn influence our cultural worldview, just as evolution has remained a lightning rod of controversy to this day with real consequences. Depending on whether I believe humans were created fully formed out of clay, or whether I believe intraspecific conflict shapes social dynamics, or whether I hold that synergistic dynamics determine evolutionary phase transitions, any and all of these could influence my choices and behavior considerably. A misunderstanding (or denial) of either evolution or physics tends to produce maladaptive forms of politics and economics, with their corresponding social impacts. Some conception of perspectivism is likely to emerge from a more accurate relational understanding of reality. It won't look like the forms we may be most familiar with or correspond to the way we have traditionally defined these terms, there are certainly many poorly articulated versions in circulation today, but it's notable that there are also many which are compatible with our early intuitions regarding mind-independent descriptions of reality. If we are going to transform our diseased culture, we will need to engage in productive discussion with some of these. 

Time and Quantum superposition

Before bringing Ian Stewart's book "Do dice play God?" back to the library, I skimmed the chapter "Quantum Uncertainty" and came across a brief discussion of the observer effect. I recalled that in Helgoland Rovelli wrote "The phenomenon from which the strangeness of quanta derives is called "quantum superposition. It means only that we see interference. When interference is lost, we can take facts as stable." (Helgoland 45, 109) The next chapter in Stewart's book dug into perhaps the strangest implication of superposition, illustrated by the thought experiment "Wigner's friend". It shows that physicists can reach completely contradictory results even though they apply the same rules of quantum mechanics to the same system. In his explanation, Stewart believes these systems are beyond the scope of standard quantum mechanics to describe. Rovelli however sees this as possible evidence for his relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. Does it broaden the scope of QM in a way that Stewart would agree with? I don't know. But a recent experiment carried out to see if 'Wigner's friend' generated the anticipated results prompted the study's authors to question the existence of an observer independent reality. “If these assumptions are correct, the tally of probabilities should be no more than 2. The real experiment gave a value of 2.47.” They wrote: “The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. This result implies that quantum theory should be interpreted in an observer-dependent way... One option to accommodate our result is to give up observer independence completely by considering facts only relative to observers”. 

Where do we go with this? Rupert Spira or Bernardo Kastrup might suggest that this implies a "mind only" interpretation of reality. But replacing materialism with idealism merely shifts the goalposts while maintaining the essentialist paradigm. In a blogpost titled "Here I part ways with Rovelli" Bernardo Kastrup wrote up his take on Helgoland: "Infinite regress: if the things that are in relationship are themselves meta-relationships, then those meta-relationships must be constituted by meta-things engaging in relationship. But wait, those meta-things are themselves meta-meta-relationships. You see the point. It's turtles, or rather relationships, all the way down. We end up with a world in which everything is movement but there is nothing that moves. Is this coherent? The result is a peculiar Frankenstein monster, neither objective nor subjective." He elaborates further in the comment section: "All theories of reality need at least one thing that is irreducible, in terms of which we can explain everything else." Why would he say this? Because one of the two sins in Western thought, according to Walter Benesch, is infinite regress (the other is contradiction). Rovelli's RQM reveals a fractal, infinitely regressing (or reflecting) description of reality without any irreducible essence. Kastrup cannot countenance this. He suggests that many theories in physics try to evade such a conclusion (superstring theory, M-theory, quantum field theory). According to Kastrup, these all tacitly acommodate this axiom of Western philosophy, making Rovelli the odd man out. So although Kastrup freely elaborates on these compatible theories, he draws a line with Rovelli's RQM, which requires making the figure-ground shift to infinite regress (infinite reflection) as a part of reality. 

Are there compelling reasons to make that shift? One commenter helpfully suggested "it doesn’t make sense to postulate the existence of entities which are not in relationship with anything else. Something exists only within relations." This is the common sense explanation, but more importantly it is also the experimental truth revealed by quantum mechanics. Kastrup does get a few things right though, in that Rovelli is like Schelling, who also collapsed the distinction between the objective and subjective into what he called an "absolute identity" - the ideas or mental images in the mind are identical to the extended objects which are external to the mind. Perhaps the most lucid commenter to Kastrup noted "the disagreement that you raise here with Rovelli is actually a recapitulation of a very ancient debate that went on in India between the Buddhist idealist Yogacara school and the Madhyamaka school. Nagarjuna, who held a kind of "anti-foundationalism" philosophy, was not a nihilist. This critique was something that Madhyamaka philosophers often railed against. Anti-foundationalism does not necessarily mean that there is nothing, what it means is that there is no foundation. See the academic treatments of his work, maybe Siderits and Katsura's translation and commentary ("Nagarjuna's Middle Way") and the work of Jan Westerhoff (Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction)." Quantum mechanics compels us to follow Nagarjuna and Rovelli, against the objections of Kastrup.

Thus, the true alternative to materialism isn't idealism (these are both one-sided perspectives), it is relativity. This is where the slogan: "Wigner’s facts are not necessarily his Friend’s facts" may be pointing us. How is relativity, this term overlain with philosophical import, to be understood in this context? It is not an arbitrary or subjective mental construct implying that all beliefs are equally true, but rather describes actual interactions. For example, speed is relative, a property of one object with respect to another. The apparent rotation of the night sky is relative, a property of our planet in motion with respect to the rest of the cosmos. These particular examples involve an element of time, which brings us to a real mind bender: Rovelli proposes that the flow of time itself, defined by the inexorable march toward entropy, reflects a particular perspective on the universe. Like the others, this perspective is also not an essential characteristic of the universe itself. "We, in every moment of our experience, are situated within time", Rovelli writes. And therefore it may be that entropy "measures something that relates to us more than to the cosmos". (Order of Time, 154) The universe may really be timeless, as it were, and it is only our experience of it, composed of various correlated events, that produces the impression of past, present, and future. Sara Walker recently pointed out "We have to invert the logic of physics, because physics, as it's always been constructed, has treated us as external observers of the universe, that we are not part of the universe. The problem of life demands a completely new way of thinking. We have to think about ourselves as minds that exist in the universe at this particular moment in history, looking out at the things around us, and trying to understand what we are from inside the system, not outside the system. We don't have descriptions at a fundamental level that describe us as inside the system."

Source: The Order of Time

Iain McGilchrist on general pathologies of perspective

In his interview, Shankar Vedantam summarized Iain McGilchrist's work thus: "Iain believes the brain is divided into two hemispheres so that it can produce two different views of reality. One of the hemispheres, the right, focuses on the big picture. The left focuses on details. Both are essential. If you can't see the big picture, you don't understand what you're doing. If you can't home in on the details, you can't accomplish the simplest tasks. This fundamental difference in orientation turns out to have profound consequences. He argues that differences in the brain and Western society's preference for what one hemisphere has to offer have had enormous effects on our lives." McGilchrist added: "I am suggesting that we have arrived at a place, not for the first time in the West, where we have slipped into listening only to what it is that the left hemisphere can tell us and discounting what the right hemisphere could have told us. I think what I observe is a sense of social alienation. The way in which we live divorced from the natural world, which is a very new phenomenon. The insistence on extreme positions, which is what the left hemisphere understands, not a nuanced argument about the pros and cons of every single thing. Meaning comes out of living in a consistent culture where there is a sense of connection with one's past. And not just one's own past, but the past of the people who made you who you were, with the other people in the society to which you belong and to the world at large. The natural world and things that are just simply beyond our ken, the transcendental. These are very important things that the right hemisphere's much better equipped to understand, and I feel the loss of them in modern life is grievous." In a later interview with Curt Jaimungal he explained: "The nemesis will come to you if you insist on having a black and white, either/or way of thinking. So we must for our own sakes get back to seeing that it's a both/and world, in which you may have truth on your side and I may have truth on my side and we ought to respect one another and talk about it in a grown-up way. Not vilifying, hating, and silencing people, but listening to people who say things different from ourselves. That's so fundamental. It's how our civilization got to have a culture, and now we're throwing it away. This sudden rise in the "not being shades of meaning" does distress me very much. [cf. Xunzi: "There are two things it is important to do in the world: to perceive the right in what men consider wrong, and to perceive the wrong in what men consider right." (page 136, Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings)] 

Arran Gare took a closer philosophical look in his review of McGilchrist's book, "The Master and His Emissary". He wrote, "The introduction of the book includes a story from Nietzsche of a wise spiritual master who, in order to rule his domain, carefully nurtured and trained emissaries. Wisely, he kept his distance from them, allowing them to do things in their own way. The cleverest and most ambitious emissary took this temperance and forbearance as weakness and irrelevance, adopted the master’s mantle and usurped his power, establishing a tyranny, which, lacking the master’s wisdom, eventually collapsed in ruins. McGilchrist’s book is an effort to justify and illuminate (and implicitly critique) Nietzsche’s insights into the nihilism of modernity (along with the insights of other anti-nihilist philosophers), to rethink the history of Western civilization to reveal and better characterize what has been lost through nihilism, and to open a more satisfactory path beyond nihilism. He reinterprets the story in terms of the relationship between the two cerebral hemispheres. While they should balance each other with the right hemisphere being the master, they have been in conflict, with the left hemisphere trying to suppress completely the right hemisphere. The subsequent battles between them are recorded in the history of philosophy, science and the arts and the seismic shifts characterizing the history of Western culture. The usurpation of power by the left hemisphere and its suppression of the right hemisphere has engendered a sickly culture characterized by a mechanistic view of the world, domination by instrumental reason, fragmentation, loss of meaning and loss of direction, all combined with a fatuous optimism. McGilchrist points out the common features shared between people with right-hemisphere damage and the psychopathology of modern and postmodern culture:

"In cases where the right hemisphere is damaged, we see a range of clinically similar problems to those found in schizophrenia. In either group, subjects find it difficult to understand context, and therefore have problems with pragmatics, and with appreciating the 'discourse elements' of communication. They have similar problems in understanding tone, interpreting facial expressions, expressing and interpreting emotions, and understanding the presuppositions that lie behind another's point of view. They have similar problems with Gestalt perception and the understanding and grasping of wholes. They have similar problems with intuitive processing, and similar deficits in understanding metaphor. Both exhibit problems with appreciating narrative, and both tend to lose a sense of the natural flow of time, which becomes substituted by a succession of moments of stasis. Both report experiencing the related Zeitraffer phenomenon in visual perception (something that can sometimes be seen represented in the art works of schizophrenic subjects). Both appear to have a deficient sense of the reality or substantiality of experience (‘it’s all play-acting’), as well as of the uniqueness of an event, object or person. Perhaps most significantly they have a similar lack of what might be called common sense. In both there is a loss of the stabilizing, coherence-giving, framework-building role that the right hemisphere fulfills in normal individuals. Both exhibit a reduction in pre-attentive processing and an increase in narrowly focused attention, which is particularistic, over-intellectualizing and inappropriately deliberate in approach. Both rely on piecemeal decontextualized analysis, rather than on an intuitive, spontaneous or global mode of apprehension. Both tend to schematise - for example, to scrutinize the behavior of others, rather as a visitor from another culture might, to discover the ‘rules’ which explain their behavior. The living become machine-like: as if to confirm the left-hemisphere’s view of the world." (p.392). To this Robert Ellis added: “According to Iain McGilchrist, the modern world offers passive, alienated disengagement and detached over-aware introspection, the loss of a grounding sense of self, a loss of meaning, bizarreness and absurdity, and a tendency to veer between fantasies of impotence and omnipotence. An increased incidence of schizophrenia is paralleled by a rise in other right hemisphere (RH) deficient conditions in the modern world, such as anorexia, multiple personality disorder and autism. The left hemisphere is unable to maintain continuity of intention over time or exercise self-control, as it will identify completely with a passing desire without giving it any wider context. It is this conflict between desires at different times that creates conflict within us over different priorities, whilst external conflict is of course between the LH of different people, or collectively of the people comprising different groups.” Regardless if one believes these are attributable in any way to the physiology of brain lateralization, the sort of deficits described by McGilchrist are nonetheless very real. 

Arran Gare summarized, "Philosophy is not one discipline among others, but the form of inquiry that not only puts all other disciplines in perspective but all intellectual inquiry in relation to life generally. It is the discipline that above all must counter the tendency towards fragmentation, including the fragmentation of intellectual inquiry into different disciplines and sub-disciplines and between scholars, experts, and technocrats. It is only a book of the scope of The Master and his Emissary that can hope to provide the kind of perspective on the current state of civilization and what is required to overcome its diseased state." In his review of the book, he described McGilchrist's thesis as “we are in a culture in which people’s left hemispheres have usurped the role of their right hemispheres and everything is seen from its perspective." McGilchrist sets himself the task of clarifying where civilization has gone off the rails and how it has failed to realize what is possible. Noting that there are two kinds of people, those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t, McGilchrist emphatically aligns himself with the latter. His argument is more complex than aligning himself with the right hemisphere against the left hemisphere. It is an argument that the development of the whole brain is required for humans to realize their full potential and to experience and understand the richness of the world, and this requires that the right hemisphere’s role not be usurped by the left-hemisphere, which, as the potential of the frontal lobes develop with the advance of civilization, it is prone to do."

"To understand the impact of a culture in which people’s left hemispheres have usurped the role of their right hemispheres, it is important to appreciate the asymmetry. Those with right hemisphere dominance are constantly striving for integration. Those with malfunctioning brains, however, can only think in terms of conflict and are unable to properly appreciate the conditions of their own existence. They have no sense of their own limitations and the limitations of this way of thinking, and are self-assured in a way that people with healthily functioning brains, who are prone to self-doubt and melancholia, can never be. The left hemisphere thinks in terms of power, and sees the right hemisphere “as purely incompatible, antagonistic, as a threat to its dominion”. It creates a decontextualized world broken up into meaningless fragments which appear to be unreal, where vitality appears attenuated, and where things themselves seem insubstantial, to lack corporeal solidity. Because of the sense of detachment, people begin to doubt the actuality of what they see, wondering if it is in fact all ‘play-acting’, a pretence, unreal. This culminates in the decadence of modernity, a devitalized world characterized by boredom and an insatiable quest for novelty, a quest that requires more and more money and is never satisfied. Unless they are checked, once a relatively stable order has been achieved people with greater left hemisphere dominance are likely to be more successful than people with healthy brains. With their manipulative, instrumental thinking and calculating, exploitative attitudes, they become successful parasites on others and on public institutions. The most problematic and damaging are those who strive for power." 

In a recent interview McGilchrist shared: "There is an incredibly beautiful and rich Iroquois myth about creation brought to my attention by Stefano Fait. It's about two brothers that have the qualities of the left and right hemisphere. Whether in China and Japan, or in Native American and Circumpolar traditions, myths around the world describe a relationship between two powers. One of them has the overarching vision, but is being usurped by the one that doesn't. For 2000 years in the West we just shrugged our shoulders and said "Well there are differences of opinion, some people see it like this, and other people see it like that", but we can tell which one is worthier of our trust and allegiance. And the dangers that we face are all too familiar. They're partly to do with the way in which our societies now seem to work - we see the world as a heap of resources that's just there for us to utilize in any way we like, we think the whole point of life is just to get some pleasure before we go because there is no meaning in life or in the cosmos at all, it's just a heap of stuff randomly colliding and we are the products of chance. Here, things that can't be measured or reduced to mechanistic terms, to a materialist explanation, have no valuable meaning, they're illusions. We are literally deluded about the nature of reality, and that is helping us unmake the world. As Whitehead put it, "There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil." Echoing this, recall "The Tao that can be named is not the real Tao" (Laozi). "If you understand God, then it's not God." (St. Augustine). "If you understand particle physics, you haven't understood particle physics" (Richard Feynman). Paracelsus said "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison". Now, in the world in which we live we've completely lost sight of that. We think that some things are simply good, some things are simply bad, and of course a child of three or four could tell you that can't be right. They experience already that some things they like can make them sick and some things that they don't like actually turn out to be rather good for them. So the very simple-minded way in which all public discourse takes place today, the idea that "this is right and this is what you must think" and "this is wrong and you must not even discuss it", well it's the death of of any kind of intellectual, moral, or spiritual life. Do we want to commit suicide? Because that is how to do it. We are dismantling a world that is intrinsically rich, complex, and beautiful and instead replacing it with a heap of garbage. I want to take people to a place where they see a different viewpoint, which will both be new and not alien. I think that a lot of people intuitively know that certain things are the case, but they have been taught by a strange and misguided culture that these ideas are childish or wrong and should be disattended to. What I wish for people is that they will make contact again with the vision of a world that is not a heap of pointless fragments, that is not chaotic, ugly, and without meaning, which is not just one in which we are the playthings of chance, embroiled in a war of all against all, but one that is beautiful, intrinsically complex, rich, conscious, and responsive."

About any piece of information, we can ask "What can I do with this?" (instrumental thinking) and "How does this help me understand the world and my place in it?" (relational thinking) Both questions are necessary. The first is needed to make the world a better place. The second is needed to deepen our relationships to each other. If we only ask the first question, our conception of what it means to make the world better remains shallow, because it is only for ourselves. We need a relational understanding to deliver on the promise of real improvement, to make the world better for all of us. Relational understanding says that the manufacture of electronics has contributed to human rights abuses and ecological degradation. Instrumental understanding says there are other ways that we might produce them to minimize such harms. If all I have is a relational understanding, then without instrumental ability I sit here and complain, but I am unable to do anything. If all I have is an instrumental understanding, I know what to do but I don’t see any reason to go out of my way to do it. Everyone has both of these capacities to some degree, but we get problems when they are out of balance. The world today is very capable of change, Western civilization has rapidly magnified the power of instrumental thinking, but because relational thinking doesn't grow in the same way it has struggled to keep pace with progress in other fields and maintain the interest of society in fostering the common good. Recall Jill Bolte Taylor's account of her left hemisphere stroke, which remains one of the most popular TED Talks ever given. She described how during her experience the stress related to her job and relationships was gone, her body was light and expansive, her spirit soared free, and she felt a sense of peace, beauty, and euphoria. She said: "I found Nirvana... I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be." Unlike other insights produced through the consumption of psychoactive drugs, the only explanation for her dramatic shift in perspective was changes to brain structure and functioning, which supports her conclusion that this capacity for a greater appreciation of relationships is available to all of us.

Mencius once argued that “People must be decided on what they will not do, and then they are able to act with vigor in what they ought to do.” Today we see the celebration of narrow and intolerant views that are unable to appreciate their own limitations, this has led to the decadence of modernity, the proliferation of parasitic forms of interaction, and manipulative, instrumental thinking and calculating, exploitative attitudes. McGilchrist wrote "If I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left-hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the keynote. Instead we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss". Left hemisphere dominance transforms the world and the environments in which people live in such a way that such dominance is fostered and reinforced. We are advancing rapidly towards the complete suppression of the right hemisphere, if we have not already arrived, and there is no easy solution. People with healthy brains, who do appreciate broader contexts and thereby the conditions of their existence, do recognize bigger problems, are concerned to uphold the processes of nature and the traditions and ideals of the institutions in which they are participating and on which they are dependent, and do have an appreciation of their own limitations, need to appreciate not only the threat of people with malfunctioning brains, but their own potential." Gare concludes: "We can recover the depth of experience by overcoming the suppression of and reviving the right hemisphere and its world. It involves drawing back from the world, not to objectify it but to wonder at it, to experience its life and to be inspired to participate in this life. It is time for a new renaissance, wiser than all previous renaissances because of what we can learn from their achievements and subsequent decay, and from what we can now learn from other civilizations, their inspiring figures and renaissances. Hopefully, with this wisdom from the past we will be able to avoid a new Dark Age.” 

Gary Goldberg weaved together McGilchrist and CS Peirce in a comment he made during a lively discussion at the 2021 Biosemiotics Gathering: "We have a left hemisphere and we have a right hemisphere. We have the left hemisphere to deal with the divided world, the division in the world, and the story of separation. But we also have another hemisphere. What's that for? What is it doing there? It's connecting us to the concrete reality. The concrete reality is one which we can't talk about because to talk you have to divide things up, you have to name things. But we feel it, we feel it's presence. The question is: Do you deny that feeling and do you say "Well, all there is is what I can see"? That's nominalism, that was what CS Peirce was very concerned about, the threat of nominalism, and that's where we are in the world right now. We're overrun by nominalism." Jeremy Lent also contrasted two different ways of looking at the world in his recent article that takes the case of Rex Tillerson, the epitome of someone under the spell of the left hemisphere's way of thinking. As McGilchrist made a point of noting, we need a "both/and" approach. We must both recognize the "music" of life and be capable of deploying the strategic interventions needed to harmonize our voices with the rest of nature. Climate change is not just an engineering problem, it is first and foremost a cultural problem. And though engineering will be part of the solution, more significantly a broader perspective that accounts for the relational dynamics, from cellular all the way up to ecological and geophysical processes, will be needed before those engineering solutions can be intelligently deployed. Lent calls this an "integrated consciousness" in his new book, The Web of Meaning. 

Consider the 'toxic positivity' of the over confident, smug, and extremely self satisfied. In some ways, it's not so much an optimism per se, as an attempt to compensate for an insecurity and fear of vulnerability, long silences, and doubt, all of which can inspire terror if one lacks the ability to manage them in a healthy way. Confidence and satisfaction are indeed very desirable and good qualities. Doubt, too, is no less valuable (far more than is appreciated in consumer culture). But the denial of what Jung called the 'shadow', the unknown, leads to a willful, peculiar 'ignorance of ignorance'. And those thus afflicted tend to objectify other people in a uniquely damaging way. All this gets carried out on the edge of conscious awareness, so the damage it causes is usually not intentional, strictly speaking, and the specific origin of the interpersonal strife it generates often goes unnoticed by them, and thus unresolved, lingering in the background of social interactions. It also persists because it can be an adaptive illusion, in the same way that Western culture has persisted in objectifying nature. Though these are both ultimately maladaptive, inflexible, and prevent the possibility of psychological growth and transformation, they compensate for that loss with certain temporary functional advantages for persisting within the current regime or developmental phase. Whether or not mental and emotional flexibility or rigidity is a more appropriate response over the short term for any given situation depends on the context, and unfortunately due to the limitations of bounded rationality that cannot be fully known. Nonetheless, over the long term it seems preferable to maintain a flexible affective disposition, informed by a broad perspective, to allow easier access to a more global optima. One should avoid a narrow worldview, whether positive or negative, even if it may permit the psychologically protective illusion of objective certainty and provide some functional advantages for reaching a local optima. How can one make this choice however, if these processes all operate on the edge of conscious deliberation? Value an education that teaches how to work with doubt and uncertainty as essential tools. A supportive environment that exposes one to a diversity of perspectives and complex social interactions can also go a long way. Both of these encourage a flexible and resilient mental outlook, a self-reflective awareness of how the world consists of "partial views upon itself, seen from within", as Rovelli and Smolin might put it. All of us are trapped, in a way, by our circumstances in life. We have a little bit of freedom, but there are limitations. When we temporarily put ourselves into another person's shoes and adopt a different perspective, suspend judgment and become receptive to others, and ask questions with no predetermined response, that's what allows us to really see and be flexible. It can be a superpower.

Daybreak (Maxfield Parrish)

The economic effects of distorted perspectives

In The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker wrote: "The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically. In The Expanding Circle, Peter Singer argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own. But what inflated this empathy circle? A good candidate is the expansion of literacy; reading is a technology for perspective-taking. Later, cinema and television reached even larger audiences and offered experiences that were more immediate. There are experiments that confirm that fictional narratives can evoke people's empathy and prod them to action. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person's mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions." 

But becoming wealthier can actually work against this trend and make you less empathetic, as Daisy Grewal describes. "Wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused." In a description of the work of researcher Paul Piff: "People of higher socioeconomic status, compared with those lower down the ladder, are more prone to entitlement and behaving unethically in their own self-interest. They are more likely to endorse essentialism, and tend to feel deserving of their lot, while viewing less-fortunate people as having earned their lack of success. (See Robert Frank on the myth of meritocracy and Will Wilkinson on libertarianism.) Although greed is a universal human emotion, it may have the strongest pull over those who already have the most." People who view themselves as superior in education, occupation, and assets tend to become more protective, and project their values and perspectives onto other groups they deem less deserving. The poor, we hear, obviously want what we have and would behave no differently if given the opportunity. But research by anthropologists like Joseph Heinrich has shown our cultural norms are not universally shared. A few important caveats: these effects are statistically "small to medium", there are exceptions on both ends of the spectrum, and some situations actually do benefit from a more dispassionate attitude. Nonetheless, as you gain more wealth and success, you're likely to drift away from empathy.

We've seen the effects of these distorting influences in both politics and popular culture. Elizabeth Spiers, a former editor at the New York Observer, famously described Jared Kushner, son-in-law and former advisor to President Donald Trump, as someone unable to empathize or understand other people's grief. And new words and phrases have entered our vocabulary. In the phenomenon of "last chance tourism" a positive feedback loop has been established which destroys the very places people claim they want to save. The neologism "flygskam" is a Swedish word that encapsulates the feeling of guilt from knowing the environmental impact of traveling by plane. These are all opportunities to reflect on our perspectives, and possibly take on new ones. Will wealthy public figures continue to act with dispassionate entitlement? Will we ignore the environmental costs associated with our lifestyles that threaten to decrease our enjoyment of the very things we value, and that even threaten the foundations upon which these lifestyles are built? In 1797 Thomas Paine, who can arguably claim the title Father of the American Revolution, wrote: "I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, whilst so much misery is mingled in the scene." He was right that it really doesn't matter how wealthy a person becomes, when we view this in the abstract, rather it is the unintended relational dynamics that must be considered. But despite Paine's rhetorical eloquence, it is in fact entirely possible to enjoy affluence whilst so much misery is mingled in the scene. Though we may not be responsible for the most egregious offenses, but because there are many in relation to whom we are the wealthy, we must hold up a mirror and ask: Where do we stand in the midst of this? 

Robert Frank has argued that economics needs to be reconceived as a relational science, one that owes more to Darwin than to Adam Smith. He explains this by noting that evolution is based on relative fitness - it does not matter how well you survive and reproduce in absolute terms, only compared to others in your vicinity. As a consequence, the mind privileges positional advantage. The fact that status and wealth are comparative also results in the apparent paradox of "a political class that is at once privileged and put-upon", per David Roberts. But see the context, and shades of grey emerge explaining the paradox. Lose the context, and black and white thinking rapidly oscillates. The challenge of living comfortably "in the middle" is the challenge of understanding we are all in some dynamic relationship to both privation and abundance, to optimism and pessimism, and to all and nothing. Absolutists bristle at that thought. Alex Gladstine noted "As an authoritarian ruler your best method for control is to get rid of the moderates. You want to have the only opposition to you be extremists." Such political figures would appear unreasonable by any other comparison. Nutrition is also a relational science. In Okinawa, the centenarian capital of the world, "hara hachi bun" is the approach to eating, which instructs people to stop at 80 percent full. This caloric restriction hasn't gone viral in America, but intermittent fasting has. Why? While both have health benefits, the "all or nothing" of fasting is easier to understand from a left hemisphere perspective, even though it is also more likely to lead to disordered "binge and starve" eating and associated health problems.

Similarly, the sunk cost effect reflects non-standard measures of utility, which are ultimately subjective and unique to the individual. The relative value of pursuing a path of business-as-usual versus one of behavioral modification tends to be weighed in favor of BAU because the metrics we use in the comparison take into account internal factors like habitual biases, estimated current resources, and the uncertainty of future reward. These constitute a particular perspective. (There is considerable inertia to overcome when changing any behavioral and physiological states, even when just making the daily shift from wakefulness to sleep and vice versa.) In arguing against it we often choose to highlight external factors like the extreme social costs of BAU and the many advantages of modifying behaviors to better adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. But because we know that given the sunk cost fallacy a highly conservative approach is the evolutionary default, if we do not first change the particular perspective of an agent it is much harder to modify its behavior patterns. In other words, because economic decisions are relative to a given perspective, it is easier to modify behavior by first shaping perspective (or public opinion) than it is to modify behavior by providing new information to an agent whose perspective remains unchanged. In fact, the latter approach will rarely succeed when pursued in isolation. For this reason, instilling a new perspective is a primary goal of both religious and secular organizations. Within Budddhism, for example, there is an emphasis on the importance of reflecting on transience or impermanence (Japanese: mujō, Pali: anicca). This can effectively address the sunk cost fallacy because closing the door to familiarity and opening it to uncertainty is often more psychologically difficult than persevering in harmful patterns. This is one aspect of a broader emphasis on critical thinking, the various higher-order cognitive operations involved in processing information: analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, explaining, evaluating, generalizing, abstracting, illustrating, applying, comparing, recognizing logical fallacies. These processes characterize habits of mind that have been called intellectual character traits. Those that aid effective and responsible inquiry are correspondingly 'intellectual virtues', whereas 'intellectual vices' (such as negligence, rigidity, prejudice, and insensitivity to detail) are those that impede effective and responsible inquiry. When combined with situational factors that influence our predispositions, such thinking habits can reduce our vulnerability to the sunk cost fallacy.

Incentives can be very effective for encouraging behavior that is unnatural to a system, with the intention of tipping it into a more optimal zone of stability. The part that often gets overlooked is that these need to be made with an understanding of the underlying conditions, the dynamics internal and external to the system, that create the currently undesirable system characteristics. For example, the underlying conditions for some cultures may already effectively incorporate a number of relational capacities and include a proportionally greater emphasis on  interdependence over individualism. From their perspective the Western consumer culture, norms, and values appear abnormal and dysfunctional. So incentives that might be appropriate within a Western cultural context, where relational capacities are not intrinsic, could be incoherent and at worst harmful if applied to those cultures where they are. The contextual use of interventions is always sparing when done right. It encourages and builds upon existing appropriate adaptations (see Elinor Ostrum), and avoids creating ‘perverse incentives’, all in the aim of ensuring that the resulting shift toward a healthier state is both stable and promotes ongoing structural coupling. We can separate incentives into two broad types, those that are intrinsic and those that are extrinsic to the system under analysis. It’s not a very clear distinction to be sure; insofar as systems have goals, values, and biased behavior patterns they are always motivated more by some things than others. Meadows juxtaposed two system types - those motivated by ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ qualities - and asked how it might be possible to shift from one to the other. In "Beyond the Limits," by Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers, we read: "The sustainability revolution will have to be, above all, a societal transformation that permits the best of human nature, rather than the worst, to be expressed and nurtured. …It is difficult to speak of or to practice love, friendship, generosity, understanding, and solidarity within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared for lesser human qualities.… Collapse cannot be avoided, if people do not learn to view themselves and others with compassion." One method (and there are certainly others) could involve temporarily destabilizing a society through extrinsic incentives, followed by a period of adjustment, the integration of the new values which then become intrinsic, and finally a re-stabilization at the ‘higher’ level. So while it is true that incentives, broadly defined, are always present in societies, when the question is about how cultures might change to avoid collapse we have to think about how transitional dynamics, shifts of paradigm, occur. And of course that was Meadows’ main topic in her leverage points paper. 

Contemporary secular societies have traditionally relied on this behaviorist approach of using incentives and disincentives to modify behavior, and under perfect laboratory conditions, when they are sufficiently guided and implemented toward a desired outcome, they are very effective. However in practice, we often find that they are routinely undermined by status quo interests. Confronted with the evidence that in studies animals also display the tendency to sink time and energy into rewards, even if there might be something better out there, and given the assumption that this tendency has persisted across species and over time through evolution, how do we account for the emergence of novel biological structures and new species (via mechanisms such as symbiogenesis)? We must assume the sunk cost fallacy can confer evolutionary advantages in certain contexts, just as we assume new collaborative relationships can promote survival as well. Sometimes change is good, sometimes bad. We need to cultivate habits of mind that value critical thinking skills if we are to maintain a flexible perspective capable of discerning the situations in which to use either approach, and avoid being locked into any single strategy. For Donella Meadows, "the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises" and "the power to transcend paradigms" are the highest, most effective places to intervene in a system. She noted that while it is conceptually simple since "all it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing" nonetheless, societies "resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else. The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it — that’s why societies have to rub out truly enlightened beings." Ultimately, she wrote, "no paradigm is true." So how do we get around the sunk cost fallacy? One way is to use a technique similar to that of the 'original position' thought experiment proposed by John Rawls. If we cannot discount sunk costs because this bias is deeply rooted in unconscious thought patterns, then imagine placing yourself in the position you were originally at before those investments were made. Knowing now what you didn't know then, would you do anything differently? 

Alternatively, Hal Hershfield has conducted research showing that placing yourself in the distant future and seeing things from the position of your 'future self' can have a similar effect on decision making. In fact, “legal struggles for the rights of future people are exploding around the world" according to Roman Krznaric. Knowing then what you don't know now, would you do anything differently? Ed Yong wrote "Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s, and step into their shoes. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self - a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person. Selfishness and impulsivity, two halves of the same coin, are just the opposites of empathy and restraint." Humans are adapted to read the minds of others while at the same time assisting those others in reading our own minds. These processes can be both distorted, as we see with tribalism and polarization, or enhanced. Neuroscientist Molly Crockett has sought to create an interpersonal-intertemporal lingua franca capable of making explicable utility comparisons to bridge the empathy gap. What we know today is that the relational science of economics and the expanding circle of empathy are both connected through the mutual need for a sort of transpersonal perspective; this remains an immense project of human cultural evolution. McGilchrist argued that the capacity to imitate is the defining characteristic of humanity. It allowed us to escape from the confines of our own experience and enter directly into the experience of others. This is the way we bridge the gap, share in what another feels and does, in what it is like to be that person, and transform what we perceive into something we directly experience. The process of mimesis is one of empathy. What we imagine is what we are and who we become.

In the world of political perspectives, few may be more polarizing than the theory of alienation by Karl Marx. One of the more surprising parts of Rovelli's Helgoland was the way he found a (somewhat circuitous) connection between Marx's thought and Ernst Mach's belief that "matter" is an unjustified metaphysical assumption, in that knowledge should be based only on what is observable. (This, as is happens, was also the premise of Werner Heisenberg.) As a result, for Mach there is no distinction between the physical and mental world: "sensation" is equally physical and mental. For Marx and Engels physical and mental conditions are also inseparable, knowledge is located precisely in the evolutionary processes of people and planet. Aleksandr Bogdanov was among the first to recognize this consonance between Mach and Marx-Engels. (In contrast to him, Lenin failed to see how things exist only in the context of their interaction, and instead sought the ossification of absolute certainty and timeless dogmatic truths.) Where Mach wrote "The ego cannot be saved", Bogdanov drew out the political implications and wrote "The individual is a bourgeois fetish". Now, in the many intervening years since the publication of "The Communist Manifesto" and "Estranged Labor" what do we see? In a recent podcast, Sommers and Pizarro take up that question and suggest that though Marx called religion "the opium of the people", perhaps the real opium today is consumerism. They suggest that while many people may feel more alienated than ever, the capitalist creation of "new wants" has effectively maintained pace to distract them (recall Juvenal's bread and circuses) from the organizational requirements of revolution. And where this has not been possible, occasional concessions to the needs of social justice have sufficed to supplement it.

Edgar Allen Poe

Social media and information wars, education and attention

We can compare the essentialist and relationalist views on technology and humans. An essentialist might say that we can identify objects in isolation and determine their essential nature, whether those objects are code or humans. Relationalists might say that it is the interactions between things that determine their nature, so describing code, humans, or anything else as essentially good, bad, or neutral is fundamentally meaningless. In daily experience, we aren't concerned with things in isolation, only in relation. In regard to the effect of social media on human systems, if we consider these as they existed before the advent of large social media companies, they were (and still are today) shaped by and composed of various ideological orientations, hierarchical structures of economic and political power, and other social and cultural institutions. After social media arrived on the scene, people began to consume a higher proportion of their media content online. It's widely known that the quality of this information has generally decreased, either through malice by those who weaponized these platforms, by greed by those who advertise with it, or just incompetence by those who have no regard for the source of information. This average decline in quality might be what one would expect if one took the capabilities and motivations of preexisting human systems and accelerated them using a neutral technology for that purpose. But there are other factors to consider. Social media platforms are not perfectly frictionless reflections of reality. Like evolution exerts selective pressures on organisms, technology exerts selective pressure on information in ways that were not intended or anticipated by their founders or coders, and the impact this has had on preexisting human systems has been mixed. They filter out some aspects of experience while allowing others to pass more easily, and they distort images and social interactions in a variety of ways. Many tech companies want to reduce distortion and make interacting feel more natural, or enhance certain aspects, but they have not been universally successful here. Nonetheless, the content and quality of this 'funhouse view' of reality, full of filtered and distorted information, feeds back into preexisting cultural and social systems in a circularly causal manner. Can social media platforms be designed for a more accurate portrayal of reality, encourage us to see things in greater context, broaden our perspectives? Yes of course they can, and that's one of the questions Sigal Samuel attempted to answer in her article. But will they ever be motivated to actually make those changes? From an essentialist perspective the answer is clearly no, they won't. But social media is embedded within larger social dynamics and preexisting cultural institutions that continue to evolve in response to the perturbations they have felt from social media. These are providing feedback that will continue to shape the future of their coevolutionary trajectory.

What sort of technologies for perspective taking can shake us out of our complacency in the face of what we know today? Is social media really a technology for perspective taking, as many of us had hoped it would be, or do the recommendation algorithms of the most popular sharing platforms only lead to more polarization and extremism in an escalating feedback loop that rends the fabric of society? Are users limited to boosting trending topics, movements, and voices that align with their goals, hoping their mutual support will divert some attention to their perspective? Ultimately, either voluntarily or under regulatory compulsion, we'll need social media (or it's future incarnations, whatever they may be) to do a better job of exposing the public to different perspectives, the evidence to support them, their intellectual defensibility, and on this basis the relationships they may have to us and the sort of things we care about. Alex Pentland, author of Social Physics, published research in a paper titled "Time Critical Social Mobilization" (2010) showing that a detailed understanding of the inherent bias and friction within technology and policy can help us design these components to help us understand our peers' perspectives, and thereby persuade and leverage appropriate action. He devised a "recursive incentive mechanism", a framework for incentivizing users to exert positive or negative pressure on each other to achieve a goal, such as reducing negative environmental externalities. This dovetails with the relational science of economics and the expanding circle of empathy; all three require a transpersonal perspective. We've only begun to explore the potential of social media.

Sigal Samuel reports on both the importance and challenges of these efforts: “A decade of evidence now suggests that digital tech is eroding our attention, which is eroding our moral attention, which is eroding our empathy. Tristan Harris calls this “human downgrading”. (Who would use social media, had they been warned this from the start?) When companies profit by putting each of us into our own ideological bubble, our collective attention shifts onto certain stories to the exclusion of others. As a result, we become less empathetic. We narrow our moral attention — our ability to see that there may be other perspectives that matter morally. The consequences can be catastrophic, as in 2017, when thousands of Rohingya were killed, hundreds of villages were burned to the ground, and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee. The Stoics wrote about the practice of attention (prosoché) as the cornerstone of a good spiritual life. Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” and believed that to be able to properly pay attention to someone else — to become fully receptive to their situation in all its complexity — you need to first get your own self out of the way. She explained: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty ... ready to receive.” This sounds very similar to Zhuangzi's "fasting of the mind". 

Bob Jickling wrote about his concerns with education thirty years ago: "We expect the educated person to have some understanding of the relationships between bits of information which enable them to make some sense of the world; they should have some understanding about why a relationship exists. The lack of attention to philosophy, and the research methods employed by philosophers, has been an impediment to the development of environmental education. This is a matter of considerable importance, as it will obscure understanding of the epistemological roots of environmental issues. Concepts are abstractions, or ideas which describe various perceptions. It is a mistake to think of them as objects or concrete entities; they are nothing more than conventional signs or symbols. For this reason the idea of a true, correct, or perfect statement about a concept is implausible. Analysis of concepts is essentially a dialectical business and such analyses are in constant need of re-examination and clarification. One of the pitfalls for researchers working in fields such as education and environmental education is to think as if abstract nouns were: "the names of abstract or ideal objects: as if there were somewhere, in heaven if not on earth, things called `justice', `love' and `truth' [and environmental education]. Hence we come to believe that analyzing concepts, instead of being what we have described it to be, is really a sort of treasure hunt in which we seek for a glimpse of these abstract objects. We find ourselves talking as if `What is justice?' [or environmental education?] was a question like `What is the capital of Japan?'" (Wilson, 1969 p. 40) "Education should not aim to advance a particular perspective, but rather teach students about concepts and enable them to think for themselves. There is considerable debate about the merits of sustainable development, where it is possible that conceptual coherence cannot be achieved. For Huckle (1991), the term "sustainable development" has taken different, and possibly irreconcilable, meanings for those who adhere to an anthropocentric worldview and those who adhere to an ecocentric worldview, and so its shared understanding may be rendered impossible by the inherent contradictions arising from these divergent perspectives. In our rapidly changing world there is debate going on between a variety of stances, and students should be able to evaluate these debates, and participate in them intelligently if they perceive a need, judging for themselves the relative merits of contesting positions."

The Consilience Project recently described how the information war has made a phase shift. “Just as the destructive power of nuclear weapons forced humanity to reorient to the idea that mutually assured destruction exists at the extremes of physical violence, so advances in information warfare require us to face the same truth of inevitable self-destruction, and to mutually back away. The challenges before us are technological, psychological, and cultural.” But most fundamentally psychological. “One common misunderstanding of information war and propaganda is that it only involves the spreading of lies and fake news. Of course, these are key tools, but note that the emails published on DC Leaks are not simply forgeries, and the ideas of Blacktivist are not simply wrong. It is precisely that they are true that makes them powerful, and potentially more powerfully divisive.” Here we see that the main tool is isolating facts from surrounding context before reinserting them into a different and usually competing narrative. 

“There are several signs to indicate when populations are being subject to information warfare. Groups tend to partition into ideological “sides,” each with its own “propaganda bubble,” based upon information from particular media sources. This ultimately results in the reduction of complex political issues to binary and polarizing propositions, both epistemically and ethically. Another possible goal of information war (especially as practiced by the Russian state): to sow seeds of internal dissension, confusion, and ultimately epistemic nihilism.” Removing context is mentally destabilizing and results in vacillation between the polarizing absolutist extremes of 'all or nothing', with no room for nuance or middle ground. “Without a healthy press, education, or public sphere, it is impossible for citizens to develop a realistic mutual understanding of the world. Societies that depend on the politicized control of information end up shrouding both political leaders and the masses in mere simulations of reality. [self deception] Democrats and Republicans now relate to each other the way the U.S. (as a whole) used to relate to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” 

But it doesn't have to be like this. “There are potential futures in which the technology currently being used to create information weapons of mass destruction could be used to create the most powerful educational infrastructures humans have ever experienced. We must make this choice, for that future is not the default path. There is no future for open societies otherwise.” Information warfare is purely consequentialist. It is blind to epistemic and ethical distinctions. What this means is that one can be consistently right and still serve the overall purposes of those conducting the war. Being right or wrong is irrelevant here, all that matters is that one aids in perpetuating the power structures, the desired patterns of divisive and contextually blind forms of interaction in service of achieving the desired end (see David Roberts on semantic blindness. This was explained with reference to Trump, noting that "he is utterly unable to step back and put his gut emotions in larger perspective, to see himself as a person among people, in social contexts that demand some adaptation. He is impatient with attempts to influence him to take a larger view".) Within this paradigm there are roles for everyone to play, including the savants, the idiots, and everyone in between. So if being technically correct isn't enough, then how does one escape the treadmill? "How do we avoid becoming casualties of the information war? How do we work as peacekeepers, or field medics, or disarmament activists?"

“Once awareness is directed at the dynamics of information warfare, a hall of mirrors unfolds in which everything can potentially enter the vortex of critical suspicion. Caution is warranted when exploring rabbit holes about information war.” What is needed now more than ever is the dissemination of the tools necessary for navigating this world. Our current understanding of reality tells us that the world consists of reciprocal reflections of dynamically evolving, partial views of itself (see Rovelli and Smolin for the physical basis, McGilchrist on the neurological and cultural basis, and Kuhn and Meadows for some of the applications). Ironically, an awareness of information warfare can serve to direct our attention to this understanding of reality, highlight the necessity of transcending narrow, absolutist interpretations, and redirect our attention to more situationally appropriate aspects and interpretations. Sparked by recent revelations in The Facebook Files, a series of recently published articles, Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmachtenberger discussed social media's effects on civilization, paraphrasing from their conversation:

"The fourth estate, the printing press, had a critical role in the formation of democracy. We don't need a small educated nobility who rules everybody because everyone can have access to textbooks and newspapers. They can be educated and we can come to a town hall and participate in our own governance. But this was based on the idea that we could get something like fair and independent news and all read the same thing and then be able to have an educated discussion about it. But when you have an internet where there's radically more information than anyone could begin to parse, what information you see ends up being determined by curation processes. I'm not going to see all the videos, all the news, all the posts. And so we respond to whatever Youtube's or Facebook's algorithms put in front of us. If these processes have irrevocably destroyed our ability to have a shared sense of reality, then how do we remake a democracy? In the presence of the speed and scale of emerging technologies our processes of governance are just inadequate. They're too slow, too divided. Technology is constantly changing and generating new issues, second and third order effects, faster than any of our governance processes can keep up, so what we really need is a new kind of governance process. We need a Manhattan Project for governing exponential technologies. I would actually say, similar to the Einstein "silver letter" that was written to FDR in 1939 that said "If we don't do this..." This is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb for open society values. If Nazism gets the nuclear bomb, or if communism gets the nuclear bomb, they will run the future. Because whoever wields the power of exponential technologies will run the world. We're at another choice point today where we have to have open societies consciously employ this technology and bind the predatory negative aspects, otherwise we're seeing what China is doing, and they're moving much faster. China said "We actually have to control these technologies otherwise they'll break the country. How do we do it?" and they decided "Let's control our Internet to not have radically divisive ideas that end up making people against being good citizens." There is an effectiveness in that, but it's in a particular direction that is antithetical to the idea of an open society. What we want is open speech that doesn't become total chaos.

"Facebook is the most powerful behavioral modification machine in the history of the world. They can gather micro targeted information on people and then specifically put information in front of them to control their behavior. If the user was the customer rather than the advertiser being the customer, and as a result the optimization algorithm was not to sell people ads or to maximize time to sell them ads but was to find the metrics that actually correspond to people's real quality of life, and the AI's were oriented to that, then we might start to get somewhere. It's a radically different business model. If we want something like an open society in the presence of exponential tech, then we have to ask: "How do we make a regulatory apparatus capable of regulating what it needs to, in time and ahead of time, and that is aligned with the civil values of an open society?" That's the central question of our time. If, for example, Facebook got made into a state utility where the interest of the integrity of the state and the well-being of its citizens were actually what was directing its AI and its use of data, and there was the appropriate data privacy and protections, and each person got to adjust the settings and say "I'm interested in learning these things, in being exposed to these other kinds of ideas, here's what I want my time on the site to do, here's what I want to curate for me", now we have a situation like personalized learning. Think about things like Khan Academy. The purpose of Khan Academy isn't to manipulate you into clickbait and to make you hate the other political party, it's to help increase learning. You could have that, the kind of thing we're talking about is personalized in the interest of helping society get wiser and more thoughtful, not whatever gets their attention. We could make new, better educational systems, and better participatory governance systems, where everybody can give input. We could use these same technologies that are destroying open societies to build better ones.

"If someone thinks something different than me, and they're a fellow citizen, I shouldn't just instantly have antipathy for them. I should try to 'steelman' rather than 'strawman' them. What might be true? What values might they hold in their perspective? Because if I just go to culture war with my neighbors and we amplify our antipathy towards each other using exponential information tech, and our country is just destroyed, but China doesn't have that problem, then it's over for our open society. How do we better understand the partial truths and values in each other's perspective? That has to become the central imperative of our time. If we really want it to be a democracy, then an effective fourth estate, and education at the level that is needed for people to understand the issues well enough to participate, are prerequisites."

Reality, Identity, and Control

Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” and Joshua Greene’s reformulation of it are thought experiments that have been incorporated into many different narrative plots, including The Matrix and Vanilla Sky. If we we are given a choice between a simulation or reality, which do we choose and why? (Not a simulation in the sense of a Baudrillard, but in the sense of Bostrom.) Does having direct access to ‘the truth’ matter more than that which we would be leaving behind - the only world we ever knew? Keep in mind that in this gedanken experiment leaving the simulation would also mean leaving behind everything within it, including all our loved ones, our significant others (children, spouse, family and friends). The decision may not be so simple. Those people and things we care about may not be ‘really real’, but the relationships are very real to us. And if you believe that reality is relational, that relationships are ontologically primitive, then the dilemma is no longer about existing in the real world or not, but living a life that offers the most meaningful relationships. For thousands of years philosophers have tried to distinguish between the "real" and the "apparent”, a distinction which also informs the grand project of science to determine what is real. According to Robert Rupert, “It might turn out that metaphysically speaking, deep down, a simulation and reality are the same sorts of things.” Rupert had information in mind when he said that. Physicists like Rovelli would say it’s not information, but relations that structure our experience. In the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nagarjuna said “The limit of nirvana and the limit of samsara: one cannot even find the slightest difference between them,” which helps to explain the logic behind a bodhisattva's choice to forego the former in favor of the latter. All three of these people think the simulation argument is fundamentally a nonstarter because it is premised on a false dichotomy, a distinction that doesn’t exist in the first place. It's a conclusion that doesn’t require us to make a choice between a simulation or reality, or between information or relationships, or between any two other things. Rupert is perhaps closest to the conventional view, for him information is the ontological primitive from which matter and form emerges. Nagarjuna’s views are rooted in the doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda, or dependent origination, which is essentially relational. This is also very similar to the position of Rovelli, who merely takes it a step further by interpreting the advances of quantum mechanics through this conceptual lens. To him information and the entire conceptual apparatus of physics replete with atoms and subatomic particles are all real, but at base they are relational. Like Buddhists, he uses the doctrine of the “two truths”, but one of these truths is more fundamental, or ontologically primitive, than the other. In other words, we can describe information in terms of relationships, but we cannot describe the bare fact of relating in terms of information. As Rovelli has pointed out, the information that informs no one is no information at all. It is the process of relating that makes information what it is. 

Perhaps a more disconcerting problem than “What is real?” is “Who am I?” If we assume that all it takes for one person to be the same as another is a chain of memories (and/or other psychological states), then what happens if two people can both trace their chain back to one? The video game Soma prompts us to consider this question of personal identity in what has been called “fission cases”. What makes us unique? If even memories and psychological states can be shared, perhaps the only thing that ultimately makes us unique is our perspective - to whatever extent it is different, to that same extent we are who we are. We are this perspective, this unique observer in relation to that which we observe. Games offer a safe way to explore both simple and complex counterfactual situations that can provide new and valuable perspectives. And as Soma shows through its virtual environment, “fission cases” provide a hypothetical that probes our deepest assumptions about what makes us unique. So if we are our perceptions, can we shape the way in which we perceive? Joscha Bach believes we can. “Things are not objectively good or bad. There is a choice that happens at some level in the mind whether these things are being experienced as good or bad. The way that we react to things is instrumental to higher level goals that we might have. We can learn a number of techniques to change how things appear to us. You can get aesthetic and sensory pleasure from a task, or you can get sensory horrors from it and aesthetic displeasure from the same task, depending on the different aspects you focus on. So put a spotlight on those aspects of the task that contain sensory, aesthetic pleasure. But use careful judgement. It would be dysfunctional to trick yourself into experiencing pleasure from an activity that actually turns out to be bad for you.” Lisa Feldman Barrett notes that you can "cultivate" the emotions you want to have in the future. Choose one and then do a specific action regularly that helps evoke it. It can be as simple as taking time to notice and appreciate the small things around you that uplift you. The whole "family tree" of positive emotions widens our perspective and shifts our focus away from the self — that is "me and my problems" — and onto others. Controlling physiological states through greater awareness and conscious regulation of the affective quality of expectations and beliefs produces chemical effects, employing things like dopamine, endogenous opioids, serotonin, and other chemicals. In his book Suggestible You, Erik Vance talked to scientists around the world who investigate placebos, internal pharmacies, hypnosis, and the power of belief on the body and mind. 

The aspirations we have for our children change over time. Those that we inculcate in them as they grow, to become internalized as adults following the developmental stages of youth, are some of the most important. A hedonistic culture can undermine social and academic values, at least to the degree that these do not lead to the implicit objectives of instant gratification or personal happiness. For many youth today, the rationale goes "If I study to be happy, then if studying does not lead to happiness it is not worth pursuing." Applied to any other choice or activity, this evaluative principle can lead to a very capricious lifestyle, as Esther Perel noted. So if not for the sake of happiness, then what other justification do we offer children (or ourselves)? Happiness is just one form of relationship people are capable of experiencing; there are many others. Perhaps children should not study or engage in any given action so that they can be happy, but rather so that they can form the appropriate sorts of relationships among the various elements of their lives, skillfully transforming these as needed in the course of events. This may sound like a very Daoist perspective, but even as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, there is a time to mourn and a time to dance. We study today, not so that we can be happy in some idealized sense, but so that we understand that change is a natural part of life, so that we understand that we can and should change too, and so that we do not privilege any single form of relationship or emotion outside of it's appropriate context.

No two snowflakes are alike

Mark Twain has often been quoted, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." Inspired by the accounts of astronauts like Bill Anders, who said, after taking the 1968 ‘Earthrise’ photo, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and... we discovered the Earth", author Frank White took Twain's insight much further. His book "The Overview Effect" describes the change in perspective that occurs when you see yourself from a much higher level. In an interview he did for a NASA podcast, he recounted how astronaut Joe Allen told him "I thought it was an extension of my travel on the Earth. It was heightened and more profound. But it was an extension of something familiar." White notes that exploring outer space is about more than benefiting ourselves as humans. "Is there some larger purpose we're fulfilling? Are we doing anything to benefit the universe?" He argues that the overview effect, this shift in perspective, is the real purpose of space exploration. It is about seeing the Earth as a whole system of which we are just one part. "We need to think of ourselves as part of this organic system. We are connected, not only with people, but with life. Everything relates to everything else. And as you move further away from the surface of the Earth there are other changes in awareness. Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell said “When I put my thumb up to the window, behind my thumb I could hide the Earth. I knew that 240,000 miles away there was a body that had approximately five or six billion people on it all striving for the same things in life. And I really thought about that for a while. Here is this planet with everything that I’ve ever known...” When astronauts land on Mars the Earth will be just a point of light. That's going to be dramatically new for us, because even on the moon, you can still see our home, our planet. There is some concern about the psychological impact of not being able to see our home." This shift in perspective prompts critical self reflection. "Why are we fighting each other? Why are we in conflict? Why are we having wars? It's a beautiful planet, it's alive, it's always changing. And yet on the surface, there's so much strife. When astronauts came back to Earth they shared that consciousness and the desire for the beauty and harmony they saw to be realized on the surface. If we want people to understand the overview effect in a way that will lead to changes in their behavior, we have to help them experience it. Virtual reality simulations offer one possibility."

White's book has subsequently inspired the creation of the Overview Institute and a short film that includes interviews with Edgar Mitchell and references to the "Pale Blue Dot", the famous speech in which Carl Sagan concluded "It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” David Grinspoon was a friend of Sagan's. In an interview he said "I find that people are in great need of some larger perspective. We need to have a long-term vision of where we want to go to help us through this time of alarming short-term threat." In his 2016 book "Earth in Human Hands," he wrote "If we change our perspective and identify with the biosphere, with Gaia... we'll understand that wise self-management and wise planetary management are one and the same." White would like to see the space and environmental movements come together, though they seem poles apart. He believes the overview effect is a catalyst for a necessary cognitive shift, away from what Charles Eisenstein calls the ‘story of separation’ (seeing mind separate from the body, people separate from each other, and society separate from Nature) and towards a ‘story of interbeing’. “The overview effect is the truth of who we are and where we are in the cosmos,” White recently told Resurgence magazine. “Indigenous peoples seem to have an understanding of this oneness and unity, but it has escaped western culture until now.” How do we bring this higher perspective down to Earth? We can support the sort of social institutions that reflect a ‘story of interbeing’ and provide a nurturing environment in which to develop. We can point people in that direction, just as we can lead a horse to water, but in the final analysis we can’t make the horse drink. We can’t incept a perspective within someone. Even if we could, no two perspectives would ever be the same. To paraphrase something Robert Rosen wrote, “the essence of an observation, of a perspective, is that at root it rests on the unentailed, on the intuitive leap”. That which is unentailed is not easily amenable to traditional educational methods. It is perhaps comparable to the spontaneous epiphany of satori. Within Zen Buddhism the student is guided through study by a teacher, but all this is merely to prepare the mind for what it alone must do. 

This is what “consciousness raising” is all about. But we don't always need virtual reality, space shuttles, or psychedelics like psilocybin to expand consciousness and achieve a global, more "cosmic" perspective. Big shifts have happened several times in our past as a result of cultural evolution. Milan Ćirković writes that ”In 1543, two revolutionary books transformed our view of both the universe and ourselves. One, written by Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius, was titled De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), and it laid the foundations of modern medical science by proving our bodies are not very different from the bodies of animals. The other, entitled De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) was by Nicolaus Copernicus. After Copernicus came Darwin’s revolution, and then Freud’s, delivering blows to our illusions of uniqueness and grandiosity within the biological and mental domains, respectively. The Copernican principle states that humans are not privileged observers of the universe, and therefore may be the most relevant here. As Galileo said, the Earth is part of the "dance of the stars”, one of many planets orbiting the Sun. But even before the term “Copernican principle” was coined, Earth was repeatedly shown not to have any special location in the universe. William Herschel later found that the Solar System is moving through space within our disk-shaped Milky Way galaxy and Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way galaxy is just one of many galaxies in the universe. The Copernican principle is the philosophical assumption upon which the cosmological principle is based, and that goes a step further to suggest that there is no center of the universe - the spatial distribution of matter in the universe is almost, but not exactly, homogeneous and isotropic on the largest scales. (Nonetheless, there have been a number of large-scale structures discovered over the years that are so large astronomers wonder if they're compatible with the cosmological principle.) As Clara Sousa-Silva said during a recent interview with Lex Fridman, "I feel like humans, and the Earth, and our place in the universe is less and less exceptional, and yet I feel so much less lonely. And so it's been a really good trade-off, that I've lost power but I've gained company."

The weak anthropic principle, a tautological truism, holds that whatever conditions are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist. This doesn't imply, teleologically, that any particular universe is necessary, as the notion of 'observation' allows an unlimited spectrum of relationships. Max Tegmark has cited the variety, nuance, and possibility of qualitative evolution in observation when he criticized the related concept of 'subjective immortality'. Observation is not binary nor subject to abrupt transitions; loss of consciousness for example can indeed be gradual. Given these characteristics, instead of the left hemisphere's reductive 'anthropic principle', perhaps this should've been reformulated as the observer/ perspective/ viewer/ relational principle. Understood in this way, and fully compliant with the Copernican principle of mediocrity, it seems to support relative interpretations of quantum mechanics such as RQM. David Barash's article on this subject ends by trying to console the reader for the loss of their illusions of exceptionalism. But would that it had instead celebrated a dawning realization of the dynamic multiplicity that greets us in its place! And now for the opposite, but equally true perspective. It’s claimed that Margaret Mead said “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” A special snowflake. But what did she mean? And how many of us understand just how uniquely special each of us really is? Would the world be a better place filled with more peace and happiness, and less greed for the acquisition of power and material gain if everyone knew this? Would we care more for our common home? Perhaps appreciating our uniqueness is hard when culture and ideology conspire to impose structures upon us that force competition instead of those that enable cooperation for the good of all. Or perhaps we are too lost in a world of sensations and stimulating distractions, rarely pausing to think about the miracle of being alive to be able to even have those sensations in the first place. Maybe it’s just too hard to think like this, maintain the thought, and develop it. In his book “Earth in Human Hands” David Grinspoon wrote "With the Copernican Revolution, we had to completely reevaluate our place in the scheme of things. Now we are awakening to our role as world shapers, and this will require another painful shift in worldview." (458) Bruno Latour is famous for saying “we have never been modern”. But perhaps we have never been Copernican. Have we really internalized its most important lessons? While none of us are at the center of the universe, and no two points of view can ever be exactly alike, paradoxically, it is our differences that are also our similarities - diversity is our one commonality. The very thing that can bring us together is the realization that each of us has a singularly unique perspective that no one else has ever had before or will ever have again. Unique, just like everyone else. That is simultaneously humbling and amazing to realize. 

If you're like me, you may be no less confused about some of these topics than when you began this article. Perhaps moreso. I’ll never completely understand quantum mechanics. The rarefied debates among physicists regarding the proper understanding of the various theories, and whether, how, and in what ways RQM, QBism, etc. might aid or hinder our understanding of reality are difficult to navigate. But thankfully Richard Feynman assures us this is not so very unusual, as he famously said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." In the end, it may be best to view the field of physics as itself a sort of gedanken or metaphor to enter into the world of process-relational philosophy and perspectivism (the worlds of Heraclitus, Zhuangzi, Nagarjuna, etc). These ideas of a living web of relationships are what brought me to Carlo Rovelli and RQM in the first place. He's an effective communicator, and perhaps he is right, but even if not it is very likely that process-relational philosophy can help to address some of our most salient cultural ailments, as McGilchrist has suggested. And we can educate future generations for perspectival awareness by supporting ideological pluralism, and living in a way that affirms the value of a multiplicity of interdependent views that mutually reflect each other, changing and transforming over time. This is the foundation of cultural diversity. As a lover of ideas and the tools of communication, I collect books and other symbolic manifestations of thought. Some people might extend these, write new papers and new books, create new art. For the majority of us, sustaining a living culture and tradition that we benefit from will be work enough. Regardless of our roles, we are all an integral part of the same tapestry. If we allow that tapestry to unravel, as it has in Afghanistan (most visibly when the Bamiyan Buddhas were blasted from the rock), and as it is beginning to here in America under the relentless pressure of an "information war", we place in jeopardy more than just the artifacts of culture. We risk losing the ability to have a healthy perspective, the most precious gift we can give the next generation.

Keywords: anekāntavāda, bounded rationality, Copernican principle, epistemic cut (Pattee), epistemological idealism, Gestalt, kupamanduka, mirror neurons, mujō (anicca), observer networks, Overview effect, "participatory universe" (Wheeler), perspectivism, pluralism, pratītyasamutpāda (blind men and elephant), relational, suprasubjective, transpersonal, upaya-kaushalya, weltanschauung, zuowang, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Zhuangzi, Rovelli, Smolin, Schelling, Kuhn, Meadows, McGilchrist

Selected bibliography (books):
Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland (2021)
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (2021)
Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021)
Brook Ziporyn, Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings (2020)
Antti Hautamäki, Viewpoint Relativism (2020)
Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World (2020)
Lee Smolin, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (2019)
Bret Davis, The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy (2019)
Juan Colomina-Almiñana, Formal Approach to the Metaphysics of Perspectives (2018)
Peter Corning, Synergistic Selection (2018)
Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (2017)
Marmodoro and Yates, The Metaphysics of Relations (2016)
Hans Christian von Baeyer, QBism (2016)
David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands (2016)
Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics (2016)
Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn (2014)
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (2013)
Siderits and Katsura, Nagarjuna's Middle Way (2013)
Robert Frank, The Darwin Economy (2012)
Michel Bitbol, De l'Intérieur du monde (2010)
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009)
Jan Westerhoff, Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (2009)
Brook Ziporyn, Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings (2009) Introduction
James Ladyman, Every Thing Must Go (2007)
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)
Imre Hamar, Reflecting Mirrors: Perspectives on Huayan Buddhism (2007)
Ronald Giere, Scientific Perspectivism (2006)
Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge (2006)
Walter Benesch, The Ecumenical Cruise (2003)
Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity (2001)
Niels Röling, Gateway to the Global Garden: Beta/gamma Science for Dealing with Ecological Rationality (2001) Paper
Robert Nozick, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (2001)
Walter Benesch, An Introduction to Comparative Philosophy (1997)
Jesper Hoffmeyer, Signs of meaning in the universe (1996)
Leonard Koren, Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (1994)
Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (1992)
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)
Frank White, The Overview Effect (1987)
David Wong, Moral Relativity (1984)
Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (1983)
Thomas Sebeok, The Play of Musement (1982)
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and philosophy (1958)
Feng Youlan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948)
Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923)
Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism (1904–1906)
Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797)
Gottfried Leibniz, The Monadology (1714) "And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad." (cited by Lee Smolin)
Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543)
Wing–tsit Chan (trans.), Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo–Confucian Writings by Wang Yangming (1963)
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (150)
Burton Watson (trans.), Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings (1963)

Selected bibliography (papers):
Smolin et al., The Autodidactic Universe (2021)
Lee Smolin, Views, variety and quantum mechanics (2021)
Lee Smolin and Clelia Verde, Physics, Time and Qualia (2021)
The Consilience Project, It's a MAD Information War (2021)
Jacques Pienaar, QBism and Relational Quantum Mechanics compared (2021) Pienaar: "Folklore has it that David Deutsch was inspired to invent quantum computing because the parallel universes suggested to him an analogy with parallel processing in computation. Can QBism answer to that?"
Jacques Pienaar, A quintet of quandaries: five no-go theorems for Relational Quantum Mechanics (2021)
Carlo Rovelli, A response to the Mucin ̃o-Okon-Sudarsky’s Assessment of Relational Quantum Mechanics (2021)
Carlo Rovelli, “Relations and Panpsychism” (2021)
Lee Smolin, The place of qualia in a relational universe (2020) The aspect/views framework employed in this paper resembles the aspect/perspective framework proposed by Walter Benesch, suggesting consilience among these thinkers.
Markus Mueller, Law without law: from observer states to physics via algorithmic information theory (2020)
Mauro Dorato, Bohr meets Rovelli: a dispositionalist account of the quantum limits of knowledge (2020)
Bong et al., A strong no-go theorem on the Wigner’s friend paradox (2020) “It could be that there are facts for one observer, and facts for another; they need not mesh,” said Howard Wiseman. It is a radical relativism. (Press reports: 1, 2)
Di Biagio and Rovelli, Stable Facts, Relative Facts (2020)
Tangherlini et al., An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks (2020)
Dennett and Levin, Cognition all the way down (2020)
Laudisa and Rovelli, Relational Quantum Mechanics (2019)
Lee Smolin, The dynamics of difference (2019)
Bret Davis, Knowing Limits: Toward a Versatile Perspectivism with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Zhuangzi and Zen (2019)
Boonstra and Slagter, The Dialectics of Free Energy Minimization (2019)
Proietti et al., Experimental test of local observer-independence (2019)
Brian Kemple, The Continuity of Being: C.S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Synechism (2019)
N. Katherine Hayles, Can Computers Create Meanings? A Cyber/Bio/Semiotic Perspective (2019)
Lee Smolin, Temporal Relationalism (2018)
Eduardo Kohn, Psychedelic science, biosemiosis, and the afflictions of an ecology of mind (2018) "Techniques for the mind’s (psyche) manifestation (dēlos), in formal terms, are anti-depressive. The cultivation of an anti-depressive emergent mode of being, grounded in the distinctive semiotic properties that forests make manifest, can provide ethical guidance in these times of human-driven planetary ecological crisis, which can be characterized as an affliction of a larger ecology of mind." (video)
Bret Davis, The Philosophy of Zen Master Dōgen: Egoless Perspectivism (2018)
Catherine Legg, The Solution to Poor Opinions is More Opinions: Peircean Pragmatist Tactics for the Epistemic Long Game (2018)
Catherine Nichols, The good guy/bad guy myth (2018)
Laura Candiotto, The reality of relations (2017)
Quentin Ruyant, Can we make sense of Relational Quantum Mechanics? (2017)
Bret Davis, Zen's Nonegocentric Perspectivism (2017)
Mauro Dorato, Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics, anti-monism and quantum becoming (2016) "For Rovelli’s pluralistic and perspectivalist view of QM, the determination between a subsystem of the universe and the universe itself is perfectly symmetrical: it is true that the nature of such a local subsystem (“space-time point”) depends on the way it interacts with, or “reflects”, the universe from its particular perspective, but in RQM there is no Leibnizian “monad of the monads”, because the cosmos can only be described from some local physical system."
Henry Rosemont Jr., Cooperating Interrelated Role-bearing Persons (2016)
John Deely, Objective reality and the physical world: relation as key to understanding semiosis (2015)
Walter Benesch, The Paradox of Thinking and The Unthinkable (2014)
James Ladyman, Structural Realism (2014)
Chad Hansen, Zhuangzi (2014)
Henry Rosemont Jr., Confucian Role Ethics: A model for 21st century harmony? (2014)
Casey Rentmeester, Perspectivism Narrow and Wide: An Examination of Nietzsche's Limited Perspectivism from a Daoist Lens (2013)
Arran Gare, Review Article: 'The Master and His Emissary' by Iain McGilchrist (2012)
Tim Connolly, Perspectivism as a Way of Knowing in the Zhuangzi (2011) "Western historians of philosophy are familiar with the motif of waking from a dream from Plato and Descartes. But Zhuangzi goes further. Any given perspective could be abolished by the next awakening. It is in “waking up” that we first gain knowledge that there is more than one perspective to be had. The more perspectives we know, the more advantageous it will be for us. We are limited only insofar as we tend to take one perspective to be authoritative. A shift to a radically “other” perspective can overturn this tendency, which in turn can contribute to new discoveries, greater self-awareness, or our very survival in the world. The fundamental value in Zhuangzi’s philosophy is one of breadth."
Alex Pentland, Time Critical Social Mobilization (2010)
Bas van Fraassen, Rovelli's World (2009) "We have here a transcendental point of view."
Arran Gare, Approaches to the Question 'What is Life?' (2008)
S. Wu and B. Keysar, The Effect of Culture on Perspective Taking (2007) (See the article in New Scientist.)
James Conant, “The Dialectic of Perspectivism” (2005) In this paper Conant suggests several versions of perspectivism including: Naive perspectivism, Non-naive perspectivism, Primary quality realism, Hidden world realism, Non-naive perspectivism slightly rephrased, Pseudo-Kantianism, and Anti-realist perspectivism.
Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity (2003)
Charles Johnson, A Sangha by Another Name (1999)
Colin Groves, "The advantages and disadvantages of being domesticated" (1999) Though we flourish, our merkwelt is diminished.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism” (1998)
N. David Mermin, What Is Quantum Mechanics Trying to Tell Us? (1998)
Donella Meadows, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (1997)
Carlo Rovelli, Relational Quantum Mechanics (1996)
Bob Jickling, Why I Don't Want my Children to be Educated for Sustainable Development: Sustainable Belief (1994)
Gilles Deleuze, "The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque" (1988)
Clifford Geertz, Anti Anti-Relativism (1983)
Janzen and Martin, Neotropical Anachronisms: The Fruits the Gomphotheres Ate (1982)
Christopher Alexander, A City is Not a Tree (1965)
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, “System of Philosophy in General and of the Philosophy of Nature in Particular” (1804) On 'absolute identity'.

Additional resources:
Amy Westervelt, Amy Westervelt on disinformation and propaganda (2021) Power manifests most clearly as the ability to manufacture a worldview, perspective, or popular public opinion that can then be invoked as necessary to marshal support for (or opposition against) any given policy agenda.
Phil Torres, Against longtermism (2021) Advocates of 'longtermism' invoke ‘the point of view of the universe’, despite the fact that such a perspective is impossible, and long since discredited by physicists, including Rovelli. As Iain McGilchrist might note, many of those who come from within a philosophically and culturally Western view of the world, given it's fascination with consequentialism and absolutism, will implicitly accept this narrow logic without seeing the broader illogical implications. The article also includes a strong critique of Bostrom and Ord's rank of existential threats to a posthuman future, which "inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change". The observation that this happens to dovetail nicely with the political interests of it's most influential supporters is hard to avoid.
John Horgan, Is There a Thing, or a Relationship between Things, at the Bottom of Things? (2021)
N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought meets the assemblage brain (2018) "What I especially like about biosemiotics is precisely this subjective orientation, which it combines in a very convincing way with empirical research." One might also call this a perspectival or relational orientation.
Christian de Ronde and Raimundo Moujan, "Epistemological vs. Ontological Relationalism in Quantum Mechanics" (2017) Characterization of the "substantivalism-relationalism debate" and proposes quantum mechanics in (non-relativist) ontological terms. This is roughly what Carlo Rovelli and James Ladyman had already described separately in their earlier work.
Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines (2016) Norbert Wiener wrote “Let me lay the ghost of another pseudo-scientific bogy: the bogy of ‘wholism.’ If a phenomena can only be grasped as a whole, it is completely unresponsive to analysis.” And if whole systems are unresponsive to scientific analysis, then they are not available for serious inquiry. “The whole is never at our disposal.”
Alexander Wendt, "Quantum Social Science" "The quantum mind... is more likely than individualism to bring people together in the increasingly urgent task of saving the planet, and with it our descendants."
Lloyd Kahn, Smart, But Not Wise. (1972) The smart/wise distinction Kahn makes regarding architecture corresponds to the difference between narrow/broad perspectives. Begins with the quote "He looked upon us as sophisticated children – smart but not wise." – Saxton T. Pope (said of Ishi)
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1923) "The only true voyage of discovery, is not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others."
George Berkley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) Berkley wrote "esse is percipi" (to be is to be perceived), a reference to the pure Latin phrase "esse est percipi". This also appeared in the film adaptation of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: "To be is to be perceived. And so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other." Compare also with 'dependent origination' and Rovelli's perspectivism. In "The Refutation of Idealism" (1903) , G. E. Moore addressed this phrase as well.

Section Headings:
Introduction
Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli's perspectivism
Zhuangzi's perspectivism
Donella Meadows and Paul Hawken's perspectivism
Jem Bendell's anti-perspectivism
Thomas Kuhn's perspectivism
Liberation and Bondage: Love and the strife of opposites
Nietzsche's perspectivism
Interdisciplinary perspectivist approaches
Time and Quantum superposition
Iain McGilchrist on general pathologies of perspective
The economic effects of distorted perspectives
Social media and information wars, education and attention
Reality, Identity, and Control
No two snowflakes are alike
Selected bibliography (books)
Selected bibliography (papers)
Additional resources

*A revised version of this article may later be published with a working title of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?: Biosemiotics and perspectivism or Steps to an Ecology of Perspectives.